General Directions for Each Attribute ChangeIf you are coding a new animalUse the directions in APE II - that is all the information you will need. The reason you would want to be reading this is to know where in the files you can change certain aspects of your animal.
If you are just editing the official animals:First decide what animal you want to change. Then, recall what expansion pack it is from. I will use the Nile Monitor Lizard as an example. Because of this I will want to locate x110_000.z2f, and open it up with WinRar. Refer to the list above to go to find which files you should go to. Extract it by first selecting the file you want, and then right click on it and hit "
Extract to Specified Folder". If I don't have a folder already made for it, I just usually place the file on my desktop.
Navigate to your destination area and hit okay. WinRar will automatically place the file inside of folders like the ones it came out of, so look for whatever the top "parent folder" is, which will be entities or ai, depending on what you are extracting. Go inside this folder and inside the sub folders, until you find the file you actually want to edit.
It should be known that you can also just find the file you want and "drag" it out of WinRar into a folder or to your desktop, but it's much easier in the end to do it the way described above. When you are done editing, instead of writing over the original files (in case we screw up), we can make a new, separate .z2f that will still give us the new attributes, but will not get rid of the original file, just in case!
Now go to the place you extracted the file to, and right click on it. Firstly, select "
Properties". At the bottom of the window, you should see a some options, including one that says "
Read-Only".
UNcheck that box; now you can actually save changes to the file. Hit okay to let the changes take place.
Right click on the icon again. Select "
Open With..." from the menu, and it should give you a list of programs you can open the file with. Scroll down till you find Notepad. Now, generally there is a little box next to a statement that reads: "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" You can leave this here, and if you do, anytime you have a file of that sort, you can just double click on the icon, and it will know to automatically open the file with Notepad. I generally UNcheck this box. Really, its a personal preference, but for XML files you do NOT want the default program to be Notepad.
The file should open up into notepad, and you can continue the directions under the correct heading below!
Then, when you are done making all of your changes, you will want to get them to work for your game! The easiest way to do this is make sure your file is in the same folder names as the original file was (the file should be named the same as the original as well). Example: a beh file is in ai\tasks. (Consult the list above to find out correct paths). So for the Nile Monitor file, I would want to make sure it was in a folder called "tasks" which would be in a folder called "ai." If you used the Extract method described above, then the work is really already done for you. Now, You should right click on the top-most folder (ai or entities) click "
Add to Archive." Before you start naming anything, locate the area that ZIP is selected instead of RAR. Now, you can name the file anything you want, but because you want this file to be override what the other files in the game say, you need to put a "Z" before the name. This just makes sure that your file is the one it uses, not the original.
Also make sure to write ".z2f" after your name, so that it becomes a Zoo Tycoon 2 File. Place this file into the main ZT2 Directory (where it installed to) and it should work! Yay!
If you run into problems with the changes you made, or simply want to go back to the way the game was before you tinkered with it, you can delete this file you made, without any damage to the game files.