How does one create a ".pal" file?

[dr rick]

the young are very cute!! Could Vondell use the young of one of the wolves with a suitable pal file to reduce the amount of actual image creation? (there are several different wolf cubs across the blue fang wolves - i used one of them as a little adult yorkshire terrier because it has much shorter legs than the wolf young of the other types - can't recall whether it was the gray wolf, the tundra wolf or the mexican wolf, but it was one of them...

I could not find a real wild nest photo, so in the end I took a couple of screen dumps from a documentary about the red panda - if I am able to do the tree, I will put a nest hole in it based on these pictures

[Jeff]

Vondell's creating all animals from scratch - no recoloring at all.
He creates the ZT versions from 3D designed animals.
That's how Blue Fang did it, and that's how he manages to imitate the ZT1 style in a superb way.

The only other person to use such a method to my knowledge, was our beloved Tasmanian Tiger (Taz), who passed away way too soon :(

I can only say: both Vondell and I are very fond of animal enrichment, we've discussed several ideas - not just in particular for the red panda; but we both have limited time. So I don't know where things are going. Vondell needs to put his skills to work first, only then can I finish it :)

[dr rick]

Ahah, that's the proper way to make animals. Congrats to Vondell. I have never managed to get 3D software to work sensibly except for Sketchup which I use to wrap images around cylindrical shapes...

I miss Taz... She was a very fine artist and designer.

I made and got working two cranes by adding to the blue fang flamingo with in-flight animations and three macaws (including a toy that they would fly into as a nest hole), by painting individual views, but then I became ill before the configuration was complete so they never got released. However, I might have another go at them as although my neurological condition is worsening all the time, my mental health is actually much better than it has been for years (something to do with 6 years of successful therapy for severe PTSD).

[Jeff]

At some point I've been playing around with Blender myself, somewhere 1 or 2 years ago, but  I didn't have the time to get it fully under control. It was all self-education as well, and I might lack the motivation and (maybe?) the skills to pull it off. Although I was and still am very excited about creating a Dingo and Ocean Sunfish (and some sharks) from scratch.

[Jeff]

A bit offtopic on the Red Panda: we're getting close, see Vondell's current projects @ Zoo Tek Phoenix  

In the last few days, I've rewritten major parts of ZT Studio. It's much faster now.
The code looks cleaner and is better documented. Just fixed some really minor issues.
Also documented a few ways ZT Studio can be tested or which *original* graphics are of particular interest to test various features.

Most important new features in these new builds:
* batch rotation fixing. Not limited to a frame anymore, but you can pick a folder and fix all the frames in all the graphics in that one folder at once! (came in handy for me, working with graphics provided by Vondell, where actually everything just needed to be moved up 16 pixels).

* shared color palettes. I added quite some info on how-to on the wiki pages on GitHub. Basically, there's a few things to prepare.
* I listed a very simple method to generate a color palette of 256 colors (including the transparent one), using GIMP. And then applying it to all your graphics at once.
* that GIMP Color Palette can be converted easily into a ZT1 .Pal file
* you'd place either the GIMP color palette or the ZT1 color palette in a particular location with a particular name (right now, the .pal name must be the same as the folder name it's in).
** example: animals/redpanda/m/m.pal => this color palette will be used for all the red panda's male (m) animations.
** example: animals/redpanda/redpanda.pal => this color palette will be used for all the red panda's animations (including the young and [we don't have it though] the female). Exceptions are made if only 1 graphic (icon, plaque) is found in a folder, since these often have colors in their graphics not used anywhere else. Think background green or highland colors in this case.

This feature has quite some potential. I already made the graphics for a (working) Umbrella Table. I still had 4 views, although I actually only used 1 image and mirrored it. That did allow me to easily manipulate the then still 4 individual color palettes (1 per view: NE, NW, SE, SW) so I could put the colors which could be changed ingame, in the right spot. In this particular case, I could use 1 color palette for all those 4 views. And I'd only need to change the order of the colors in this palette once. Which makes it much easier to generate objects/buildings/... of which the color can be changed.

We did a test case for it, since Vondell suggested a lighter version of the red panda as the animation for the young (simply making it even smaller was not much of an option, it would become too small and not very recognizable). I simply made a copy of the male's animations (.PNG files), I batch converted the .PNG graphics to ZT1. Afterwards, the only thing needed, was to export the color palette of the young (animals/redpanda/y/y.pal) to a .PNG color palette (16x16 pixels = 256 colors. We generate this .PNG image since it's easier to manipulate than a GIMP Color Palette). I made a brighter version of it, and replaced the colors in y.pal with the new ones from this .PNG color palette. Et voila: a very simple recolor of the entire animal..

Big kudos to Vondell for teaming up to work on the Red Panda. It's been a long way so far, but our processes are streamlined now.

So the only question which remains unanswered for now (maybe forever?): what is the meaning of those two mystery bytes?

If we ever want to find it out: I think it might be useful if we compiled a list sometime, some day of each frame in graphics and their basic properties (height, width, offsets, amount of colors, amount of bytes in drawing instructions  in the frame [after all, they are right in front of them], etc), combined with those two mystery bytes... translated in most likely one number (or are they 2 separate things after all?). Is it some kind of signature? Do they contain a checksum? Do they occur only in frames which start with FATZ/ZATF or not? The mystery continues.

[dr rick]

 
I like the sound of this

We did a test case for it, since Vondell suggested a lighter version of the red panda as the animation for the young (simply making it even smaller was not much of an option, it would become too small and not very recognizable). I simply made a copy of the male's animations (.PNG files), I batch converted the .PNG graphics to ZT1. Afterwards, the only thing needed, was to export the color palette of the young (animals/redpanda/y/y.pal) to a .PNG color palette (16x16 pixels = 256 colors. We generate this .PNG image since it's easier to manipulate than a GIMP Color Palette). I made a brighter version of it, and replaced the colors in y.pal with the new ones from this .PNG color palette. Et voila: a very simple recolor of the entire animal.

[Jeff]

Yes, it's quite cool, because previously you'd have to either recolor the actual images to get a proper color palette at the very end or perform some magic similar to the method I described to create such a shared color palette - and then the biggest trick was to make sure you kept the original order of the colors.

Now, for recolors of animations, you could simply:
- open for example animals/tiger/tiger.pal  (obviously you'd take animals/ABCD1234/tiger.pal or whatever the ID/shortname of your new animal is) in ZT Studio.
- save the palette as a .PNG-file containing all the colors
- load it in your favorite graphic manipulation program (GIMP, Paint.NET, whatever)
- adjust the color balances like you'd normally do, save the .PNG
- reimport it in ZT Studio
- save as .PAL.

Done. Except for the icons and plaque, you wouldn't even need to mess around with the graphics - if your tiger is the same size obviously.
It's a deliberate choice to NOT include any graphic manipulation (resizing, recoloring etc) in ZT Studio, but only the core: save/view/load the file formats and adjust offsets.