Need Help With Guest Editing

[I_27_04]

:cool   :mellow I was trying to edit guests and i finaly opened the guest file but only to find out that the animation is made up out of pall files and i dont know how to read them.  :mellow
If somebody could tell me how that would be good

[csleesburg]

Originally posted by I_27_04@Apr 25 2006, 05:40 PM
I was trying to edit guests and i finaly opened the guest file but only to find out that the animation is made up out of pall files and i dont know how to read them.

the animation is made up out of pall files
 :blink huh? What are 'pall' files? (or what do you think they are)? We need some more info before we can help, I'm afraid.

[Yellowrose]

I don't believe this was ever accomplished due to the complexity of the programing for a guest. The idea was eventually given up on.

[I_27_04]

If you turn the guest ztd file into a zip file then unzip it you wil find thees animation files called .pal files but i dont know how to open them

[Jay]

The guest (and staff) graphics are in the same format as all of the graphics within ZT. There are image files representing the direction they face, such as E, N, NE, S, and SE. There are also color files, such as man.pal. Since these are in the same format as everything else, the ZOOT program can be used to extract the images. The images have been extracted and used before. For example, the "Guest as an Animal" download extracted and used them.

However, if you are trying to make new images that you want to be used as new guest images, that is more difficult. The reason is that Zoo Tycoon will change the colors on the fly. For example, one guest will have one hair color, another guest will have a different hair color. So man.pal has one of the hair colors. But Zoo Tycoon will sometimes change that and use one of the colors in hair.pal instead. Therefore, if you were making new "man" graphics, you would have to use the same colors that are in man.pal and no other colors. More importantly, you would have to use a graphics program that put those colors in the color palette in the same order that they are in man.pal. At this point in time, we do not know how to accomplish that. If we could do that, we would be able to create all downloads more efficiently than we can now since we could use a single ".pal" file for each user created item instead of multiple ".pal" files.

But sometimes you can get close. When I created the Gorilla As Guest and Animal As Guest hacks, I reduced the number of colors that would be substituted to 1. That still causes some pixels here and there to change, but not as many. I tried to reduce the number of substituted colors to 0, but that caused the game to crash eventually.

[I_27_04]

I have alredy noted the fact that the hair and shirt changes and the obsticle will be removed. I am only asking if zoot can change the hair to some other picture(supposeing that crashing was not a thret) would it work. or would i have to lets say change the file that seas the color the animation is( example: blue insted of red).
my last question is where is the websight with the apes for I wish to examin it. Thank  you.

[Yellowrose]

A.P.E 1.1 which can be used to view the files Jay mentioned can be downloaded here at Zoo Admin in the Utilities section of the downloads Zoot can also be downloaded in the same section.

[I_27_04]

ty I am glad that i know where to find it. could sombody plzzzz tell me where to find the ape guest hack, you know the one everibody has ben typeing about, the one that makes your guests apes instead of human,( if i copied off of it it would be alittle easyer) becaus i cant find it anywhere in downloads, and i think it would be easier if i just edit that, or atleast see how it works.

[Jay]

Originally posted by I_27_04@Apr 25 2006, 09:43 PM
I am only asking if zoot can change the hair to some other picture(supposeing that crashing was not a thret) would it work. or would i have to lets say change the file that seas the color the animation is( example: blue insted of red).
my last question is where is the websight with the apes for I wish to examin it. Thank  you.

APE does not work for guest images. APE only works for object and animal images. You would have to use ZOOT to examine or extract the guest images. ZOOT would not show just the hair. It will show the entire guest image. Once images are extracted, you could use a graphics program to change the images. Then ZOOT can be used to load those images. But, as I mentioned, you cannot rely on the order of colors that the graphics program will create. So it might not do what you want it to do.

The Gorilla Guest Hack is at Zookeeper's Lounge: http://www.lunamanar.com/zklounge/index.php?showtopic=959
But it does not have graphics inside it because it is using the Zoo Tycoon graphics directly.

[I_27_04]

lol. how are you so sure I need ape to make animals?
I dont like ape becaus it has limits. like it only lets your animal have up to four babies, or for another thing, you cant make the time from when their born to the time they are adults less than 500. ape has limits that can be surpassed if you no how to use a .ztd file in the right way. I think it is a very well done project, I just personaly enjoy editing the ztd files directly.