Shelter Use Editing?

[Ada]

I have a question to the expirience creators around here.
I have downloaded a certain animal (from another site). It is a very good and innovative design with nice graphics, however it has 1 major bug - the creator has forgotten to assign a shelter for it to use. The animal gets angry for not having a shelter, but will not use any of the game shelters when I place them.
I tried to contatct the creator via E-mail and tell him what was wrong, but I'm not getting any response for quite a while now. I guess that the person probably changed his E-mail adress or is no longer interested in ZT2. Therefore in order not to violate his laws I will not be able to release it to the public or even make a patch. I would however like to edit the animal for my personal use only.

I would be very gratefull if someone could tell me how to edit the list of shelters a certain animal will use. What file should I edit and what should I change?

[JoJo]

Which animal is it???

[Ada]

A Racoon.

[Bengal]

While I'm sure you'll get help here, does the site you downloaded it from have a forum? You may want to post there and you might get a quicker response since they are more familiar with the download.  

[Ada]

They do have a forum, but its not dedicated to editing files, therefore it wouldn't make sense to make posts there. I figured that if the author doesn't reply to E-mails, he won't respond to posts either.
Anyways, this is getting off topic. Could anyone help me with the editing?

[csleesburg]

While I, personally, would not edit someone else's creation, I will say that the shelter assignment is in the .xml file located in the ai. It would be the MAIN file. For example, in ZT2 there are xml ai files for BearGrizzly, then for BearGrizzly_F and BearGrizzly_M, etc. Their shelter is located in the main BearGrizzly. If I were editing something I would copy the line exactly from an animal who does use the shelter I wanted, and place it exactly where it shows in that animal's ai file. That is, if I were doing it for my own personal use.

[Ada]

That is, if I were doing it for my own personal use.

Don't worry it will be. I like the racoon design very much (why else would I go through all the fuss with it) and I highly value the author's work. Its a shame I haven't been able to contact him. In no way was I trying to "steal" or abuse someone else's creation. I just wanted to fix an obvious bug that was making this otherwise great animal unplayable.
Anyways, releasing any "tweaked" content to the public might be considered stealing and a violation of copyright laws and I will have none of that. This is just for my personal use only. I will not give it to anyone, unless I get the original creators permission to do so. Period.

I'd like to thank Csleesburg for beeing very informative and helpfull!  :wtg
I got the information that I wanted (thanks again), therefore this topic can now be officialy closed.

[csleesburg]

Glad you got the 'nuances', Ada! :lol Thanks for telling us the question has been answered. Topic now closed.