substituting default pets with my own creations

[amjoie]

LOL! You'll all have me busy for the next few months, if this continues.

I think a Manchester is doable. I'll sure give it a try.

I enjoy making pets. It's a lot of fun. But the problem with trying to make Sims 2 dogs look like real dogs is that Maxis/EA didn't give us enough maneuver room within CAS.

For instance, to make longer coats, I have to enlarge bodies. The coat itself is one length for smooth/one length for hairy -- and that's it. And both are really short. So the body itself has to enlarge to look like longer coats. If you take the extra hairy texture off the collie, it will just be a very fat smooth dog.

Ears remain smooth, regardless of how much hair is on the body. The poodle has more hair on the ear, but the only way to access that is through the whole poodle cut. Legs are all one length, and bodies are all the same size from chest to tail -- so no dachshunds are possible. Only certain patterns/colors are possible, although there is a bit more flex in that because of opaque to transparent color layers. But I can't put eyeliner on pets, so many cat breeds just don't look right.

I guess what I am saying is that I could paint you a perfect pet off a photo, but I can only do a "so-so" job, at best, for the Sim 2 pets. I am really hampered by not having enough options in CAS.

Undaunted, however, I will go on trying. LOL

[maxon]

Amjoie - we all understand that and still like your efforts. 

My gripe is the fold over ears - there aren't any.  You can have upright and floppy but not fold over.  The Liver Doberman you did is very like my Harry except I'm English and we don't crop the ears and (sometimes) the tails over here.  Well, the tail I can deal with but Harry's ears weren't clipped so they dropped over as he grew up and you can't get that for love nor money with the pet builder.

[amjoie]

OK, see if you can download this RAR of the requested dogs, below, and test them in the game. Let me know if they will work for you.

I hope AMjoie Bailey Boy is supposed to have a short tail. If it is long, let me know. I couldn't get the cute fluff on his ears, and the markings are hit and miss. But I did my best. Sigh.

Is the AMjoie Black and White Cockapoo anything like you had in mind? Sorry about the fluff missing on the feet. No way to do it.

I think you will like the AMjoie Megchester. She turned out cute.

I am really upset by the AMjoie Red Setter. I *can't get longer ears*!! Soooooo annoying. What would it have cost Maxis/EA to give us longer ears in the slidebar option for ears? I am not awsome enough to know how to change the limitation, so the poor AMjoie Red Setter will never make it to Ireland. 

These are only CAS pics, and they are always a bit distorted. The dogs should look better in the game. The only large dog is the AMjoie Red Setter. The rest are small dogs.









http://www.virtualpetz.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/latestdogsbyrequest.rar

[maxon]

Fantastic - I'll test those for you this morning.

[amjoie]

Maxon, I certainly agree with you about the ears. I tried the Dobie with short hanging ears and he looked stupid. So I just left the cropped ears. We desperately need fold over ears. So many breeds have them. Sigh.

I realised after I uploaded the RAR and pics that I missed the white feet on the AMjoie Black and White Cockapoo. I'll make that correction.

[amjoie]

Sorry about the double post, again, on this thread. LOL

I needed a time stamp to this post. If you downloaded the dog RAR before I wrote this post, then please download again. I did some tweaking on a couple dogs. They are better now (even if you can't see what I did.) 

[CAFlanny]

Pardon my fangirl squeal.  That is soooo cute!  It's very close to the real thing.  How did you get the "eyebrows"?  The only suggestion would be that he has the bow marking across the chest in the brown.  Awesome job! ::downloads eagerly::

[Ambular]

Awww, those are so cute!    *Snuggles them and downloads*

[amjoie]

The eyebrows were always available, but I "discovered" them when doing Bailey Boy.

AMjoie Bailey Boy has been fixed to more closely resemble himself. Please redownload.

I'm glad you all like the CAS photos.

I'm hoping they'll please you even more in the game. Please let me know how they are working for you. If you like them, I'll get in-game pics and put them up on my website. But I'll wait to do that until I hear back from you -- just in case some of them need more tweaking.

[maxon]

Hi amjoie,

I played yesterday with your pets files (and one or two others) in Pet Breeds and removed (temporarily) nostrayrespawn.

All the animals spawned by the game were from those files in pet breeds - didn't seem to cause any problems.  I got Pets in the adoption pool and strays - all looking lovely.  I even had Scooby Doo run past the house one morning.  The only oddity was that the puppies and kittens didn't have names - they were called female kitten, male puppy.  I've no idea whether that's normal since I've not being playing with Pets much.  It's easy enough to change anyway.  The adult dogs and cats were all named with the default names.

I had one dog get a job and a promotion and this didn't cause any problems with unlocking whatever (I also took out the kissingpoint.package I got from TwoJeffs since I was testing).  I have a pregnant dog but she hasn't given birth yet - I'll check that works normally today.

A couple of things:
1. There are files in the Maxian Pet Breeds folder called createadog, createasmalldog and createacat - they're going to be the template files which appear in CAS.  I thought you might perhaps want to move those back into the Pet Breeds folder.  They don't seem to make any difference to how it runs but whatever.

2. If people decide they want to do this - replace the Maxis defaults with custom - they will need to know that any breeds you save in game will get saved in that very same folder - Pet Breeds along with all the Maxian defaults.  I retrieved several files of animals I'd made.  They have names like 0x039485.package unless you renamed them (which I did once I found them).  So if you want to keep any breeds you'd made previously, you'll need to go looking for them.

Oh and thank you for the Manchester Terrier - lovely and, despite the ears, the setter looks great in game

[amjoie]

I had forgotten about the create-a-pet templates. Thank you for pointing them out. They mean nothing to me, because I don't use them, but they should definitely be iin the game. I knew there was a reason I hadn't started writing the tutorial yet ...  LOL

I was aware of the garbage numbered saved custom pets in the PetBreeds folder. I had discussed that earlier in this thread. I will make a point of that in the tutorial, hopefully more clearly than I scribbled before. I'll start working on the tutorial, and put up a draft of it in this thread, so people can comment on whether or not it seems clearly written.

You have been doing a wonderful job of testing. Thank you so much. You are giving me exactly the kind of  information I needed to hear.

CAUTION: A known and officially acknowledged Maxis/EA bug prevents the puppies and kittens from "inheriting" their parents markings. They usually come out the base color, minus the added coat color/marking layers of the parent dogs. Sometimes they only inherit the base color from the female. This known bug was apparently squashed (that was the claim, anyway) by the latest Pets patch. Unfortunately, the latest pets patch has some rather severe known isssues of destroying proper coloring of human hair and other strange and not so nice anomolies (like misshapen and ugly toddler faces, despite nice looking parents) -- so despite the fact that I would dearly *love* to have pets babies inherit coloration/pattern properly, I have not installed the patch. Maxis/EA has actually acknowledged the problem with the patch, so there is hope they may "patch the patch," thereby making it possible to get good puppies and kittens. Until then, expect rather generic and even ugly pet babies -- even from my otherwise beautiful pet parents. My solution has been a holding pattern, not allowing my pets to breed, until this issue has been resolved.

I think the puppies and kittens are, and have always been, nameless. That is why they give you the option of renaming any pet you adopt or buy in the store. I also believe, unless I am mistaken, that any adoptable puppies or kittens will be generated from random parents in much the same way as if you had bred pets on your lot. So they will most likely have the same generic and possibly ugly results as breeding your own pets. I guess I would only adopt adult pets until the pets patch is patched, so we can safely use it.

It's great to know about the unlocking of additional colors working well, as career rewards. I hadn't been able to test that, yet.

But since you took out your kissingpoints for testing, do make sure the colors I mentioned on my website are unlocked, though, because that will dramatically affect the coloring/shading of the pets I created. The things that must be unlocked are pink, and the bandit mask for dogs; and pink for cats; as well as pink for the Wilds (which is actually pink for both cats and dogs). It wouldn't hurt to also unlock the bandit mask for the cats. I think I'll add that to my website, because it is unlocked in my game, and I will no doubt eventually get around to using it during the creation process.

And I'm glad you are enjoying the AMjoie Megchester Terrier. 

As far as the ears on the AMjoie Red Setter, I have come across a modder who has obviously figured out a way to enlongate ears. I plan to write to them asking how they did it. No doubt something approaching awesome, so I am not sure they will tell me, and not sure I can duplicate it, even if they do. But I'm planning on making inquiries .... Until then, he is still a very pretty dog in the game -- just not very "Irish."

[nesschap]

Thank you so much for these wonderful pets!  You did an amazing job and I'm very excited to be using them in my game!!

Vanessa

[Tyraa Rane]

Thanks so much for these! It's nice to finally have Abys that actually look something like my two boys.

[notveryawesome]

Just an FYI: puppies and kittens do seem to be born with only the basecoat of one of the parents, but when the babies age to adult, they suddenly have all the markings.

[amjoie]

I have been busy with Seasons, and let this little project slide. 

In a way, it is a good thing, because things have changed a little. Since Seasons, it will not be possible to have only custom pets in the game UNLESS you use the empty templates for the Seasons expansion. If the empty templates are not used, *every single new neighborhood you make* will automatically put the same ugly MaxisEA default pets into the new hood. The ugly pets are all black, or gray, or black and white. No variety, no color, no beauty. They are not coming from the Breeds folder. They are hardwired into the game, so you don't even get variety within the ugly MaxisEa breeds -- you just get the identical ugly pets each time. And you also get the same buggy Sim families from Seasons in every hood. There is no way around this except to use the empty template for the Seasons expansion.

Go here, if you want to clean your game of the trash pets and buggy Sim families:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4306.0

Once I get my Seasons game stabilized with all my mods and cc, I'll turn my attention back to this project. I will need to do more testing before I can write the "how to" with any degree of certainty.

[maxon]

In a way, it is a good thing, because things have changed a little. Since Seasons, it will not be possible to have only custom pets in the game UNLESS you use the empty templates for the Seasons expansion. If the empty templates are not used, *every single new neighborhood you make* will automatically put the same ugly MaxisEA default pets into the new hood. The ugly pets are all black, or gray, or black and white. No variety, no color, no beauty. They are not coming from the Breeds folder. They are hardwired into the game, so you don't even get variety within the ugly MaxisEa breeds -- you just get the identical ugly pets each time. And you also get the same buggy Sim families from Seasons in every hood. There is no way around this except to use the empty template for the Seasons expansion.

Actually, it's not a change.  When you made a new neighbourhood with the Pets version of the game, the Pets template hood (with all the same pets) would get copied and the same set of pet files would be dumped in the hood - so you would always have the same set of Maxian pets/strays/whatever (with the same names too).  It works the same way (or I guess it does) as the Pleasantview townies - you get them in every new hood the same because the game just copies the files from its pristine copies in your game files.  It would always be a pre-requisite to have the clean templates for this to work as you want with custom pets generated.  I should have mentioned when I did a little testing for you, that my game was set up that way at that point.

[amjoie]

Not exactly, in my experience, anyway. It worked that way in the default MaxisEA created hoods, but not in custom hoods.  In my Pets game, the breeds were randomly generated for each new custom hood, using the files in the Breeds folder. Even before I used the "empty pets template" I was able to get a whole new batch of ugly MaxisEA pets in each new custom hood. So, at least there was some variety. The names were always the same, but the animals differed from hood to hood. That was why it was possible to put your own breeds in the Breeds folder and get the game to randomly generate only pets you personally chose for your game, in each new custom hood, once the MaxisEA breeds were removed.

Now, since Seasons, you have no control over the automatically installed sims that infiltrate each new custom hood. Before I could opt out of adding a subhood with its attendant critters; but I could not opt out of the Season's "undercover subhood critters." And the pets/sims for each new hood are exactly the same. They are not generated, but are instead from some templates hidden away in the game's innards, where they are difficult to find and/or change. It was like MaxisEA was *forcing* you to have identical black, gray, or black and white ugly pets -- no matter what neighborhood you used. No color, no variety. The only way around it was to create pets in CAS and join them to a family. So adoption was not even a possibility, if you wanted a nice pet.

But, with the fix for Seasons (still works like an empty hood, but is a bit different in how it does it), you not only rid yourself of the templated ugly and colorless pets, but you also remove some very serious problems with the identical families that recreated themselves in each new custom hood.

I don't view the empty hood for Seasons as a choice, like the previous expansions. I think it is a necessary critical type "fix" due to the problems with the potentially hood-breaking pregnancy/parenthood issues of the characters that spread from new custom hood to custom hood like a virus.

But, regardless, the point is moot. I will be stating in the upcoming tutorial that I cannot guarantee the method works unless empty templates are used for all expansions. That will likely cover upcoming expansions, as well. People who want control over the generation of pets would probably want control over the generation of townies, also. I can't imagine it would be too much of a imposition to require the empty templates.

[maxon]

Not exactly, in my experience, anyway. It worked that way in the default MaxisEA created hoods, but not in custom hoods.  In my Pets game, the breeds were randomly generated for each new custom hood, using the files in the Breeds folder. Even before I used the "empty pets template" I was able to get a whole new batch of ugly MaxisEA pets in each new custom hood. So, at least there was some variety. The names were always the same, but the animals differed from hood to hood. That was why it was possible to put your own breeds in the Breeds folder and get the game to randomly generate only pets you personally chose for your game, in each new custom hood, once the MaxisEA breeds were removed.

Well, ask Jordi about it - AFAIK that's how it works and if you got different it might be because of something in your game.  The names are drawn from a separate file.

[Ambular]

Hmmm.  Using the empty hood templates won't prevent the game from making wolves, will it?  O_o

[Joshre]

I tried going on the link but the website won't work what happened?

[maxon]

Hmmm.  Using the empty hood templates won't prevent the game from making wolves, will it?  O_o

No - the files for those are elsewhere - they seem to be Universals (same in every neighbourhod) like the Grim Reaper and Mrs Crump.

[amjoie]

Well, ask Jordi about it - AFAIK that's how it works and if you got different it might be because of something in your game.  The names are drawn from a separate file.

... or a lot of somethings in my game.  LOL  I've got mods, mods, and more mods. So yah, it could be just my game.

I'll bear that in mind, when I write the tutorial. 

about the link:  Try clicking on it again. I just did, and it still works. But I have been getting some "page not found" and "can't open that address" type messages just trying to open More Awesome Than You website, every once in a while. I just keep trying again until it opens. I think it is because this is a very busy site whenever a new expansion comes out.

[notveryawesome]

I just wanted to report that your petbreed names are showing up in my game just fine, so I'm not sure why others are having problems with this.

[J. M. Pescado]

I play with the nostrayrespawn but that doesn't let me adopt via phone, so I'm taking it out anyway.

The splodyness from that should be fixed now.

[pioupiou]

I just wanted to report that your petbreed names are showing up in my game just fine, so I'm not sure why others are having problems with this.

I think it has something to do with the language you play the game in. I play in french and I have downloaded some of amjoie breeds and they are named something like "nommez cette race...." ("name this breed"). Looking in Simpe I found that the real name appear only in the English field, all the other languages are filled with the same phrase...