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Author Topic: Help with creating my first playable creature  (Read 2103 times)

The Mighty Dorf

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Help with creating my first playable creature
« on: October 05, 2014, 05:32:34 am »
Hello guys! As the title explains I want to create my first playable creature in the latest version of DF (at the time of typing) 0.40.13. I have read the tutorial on the wiki and get it a bit, but I still have some questions which I want answering. Any other advice you guys might have would also be gratefully accepted!

1. Firstly, how easy and feasible is it to make a creature's blood impart a syndrome or other harmful effect on stuff that comes into contact with it without making it hurt the original creature? I'm thinking something like one of the effects that evil clouds or megabeast dusts can inflict.

2. This isn't so related to the creature I have in mind, but is it possible to make a creature with 'inorganic' blood, such as alcohol or water, etc?

3. Would the easiest way to go about making a bipedal reptilian creature be to copy and edit the existing raws for a creature like a reptile man or something? What problems might that cause?

4. Where and how do custom-created races normally appear in the world? This creature is one I want to make more for the purposes of adventure mode. How does the rest of the game world react to a modded in creature such as this?

5. What sort of cool stuff can you do with castes? This is a general question, whatever cool stuff you've done or seen done.

Sorry for all the questions, and thanks very much in advance!  :D
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Octobomb

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #1 on: October 05, 2014, 05:44:00 am »
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Syndrome#The_anatomy_of_a_syndrome
1. SYN_IMMUNE_CREATURE (see wiki)
2. Yes, just define their blood as alcohol (see wiki section on creatures)
3. Yes, there should be no problems unless you muck something up, which the error log will catch.
4. Not my speciality, I'm afraid.
5. Lots and lots of very cool things. I can't actually remember any specifics, but things like Pokemon style evolution, something I played with once which transformed sentient species into certain enslaved varieties of themselves and so on.
I hope this helps and good luck!
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scamtank

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #2 on: October 05, 2014, 05:46:33 am »
2.) You could make creatures bleed powdered gold ([BLOOD:INORGANIC:GOLD:SOLID]), if you so wished. Curb your expectations on super-super-hardcoded stuff like magma, though.

3.) Consider starting with the basic dwarf as the template instead. Then you can reptilize them at your leisure, replacing the bodies, tweaking stats and replacing anything that's missing or wrong. Reptile men by default are cave creatures with their own specific behavior and lack some of the details that civilized creatures need to work right and I think you'd fuck something up working from that angle.

4.) The same way all the others do - from the sites that their entity (civilization) has or as blank-slate outsiders.

5.) Guild membership. All creatures are born to a caste that heavily skews their skill development, physical attributes or even appearance.
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The Mighty Dorf

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #3 on: October 05, 2014, 05:54:16 am »
Thanks very much you guys! I'll try make this creature and if I run into any difficulties I'll post them in this thread. Stay tuned!

Edit: Don't want to make a new post so I'll edit this one. Does anyone know how I can tell what tile and colour I can change it to without pure trial and error? I need to edit what it'll show up as symbol-wise in-game.
« Last Edit: October 05, 2014, 06:27:41 am by The Mighty Dorf »
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scamtank

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2014, 06:58:45 am »
Token listings are better than any tutorial. This is also one of those things that's real simple to figure out from looking at other creatures. I mean, just look at this here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

See it yet? However, I admit the way colors work is a bit obtuse. See here for the mechanics.
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The Mighty Dorf

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #5 on: October 05, 2014, 07:35:55 am »
Thanks for the help with the colours scamtank. Yeah, I basically copied the dwarf raws into my new .txt file and am editing them. I copied some useful bits from other creatures (Lizard to get the scaly skin) and am generally just editing it all to make it work and unique from the norm. I think I managed to make the blood of my creature impart paralysis on anything which touches it other than creatures of its own species, obviously, and I've made females of the species have feathers a la Archaeopteryx (or whatever that dinosaur was that had feathers). Otherwise I'm still doing work on it to make it cool, and I've yet to even see how it'll work in-game! (Here's hoping there won't be any big issues!)
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The Mighty Dorf

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #6 on: October 05, 2014, 07:55:09 am »
Okay, this time I have a bigger question. Basically, neither the males or females of my creature have hair, but the dwarves do and so I have all this junk about selecting the hair tissues layers so that I can add colorations. My females have feathers instead ([BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:BODY_FEATHER_TISSUE_LAYERS]) so I was wondering if I could change out the hair thing for the feathers somehow, but I don't know how to do that. Anyone got any ideas? It'd probably make more sense if I posted the incomplete file here along with the default dwarf one.
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Illogical_Blox

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #7 on: October 05, 2014, 09:07:21 am »
For 5: My Piscesi race have females much larger than the males, who can rip apart dwarves (though the males are much smaller). Also, the Genesis and Masterwork mod have a large number of castes (in Genesis, there are about 8 castes, like Stone and Mushroom.)
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The Mighty Dorf

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #8 on: October 05, 2014, 09:40:29 am »
Thanks for the info on your experience with castes, Illogical_Blox. I only have the castes of between male and female, and there aren't too many differences between them (don't want to get too in-depth for my first creature) but I like what I did. Females have feathers and are specialised in a few skills the males aren't, while the males get extravision and a naturally higher level in Sneak.

Nonetheless I am still trying to figure out how I'll get fixing this dwarf hair variation stuff into the feather variations for my females. Would it be okay (aka it is allowed) to upload the raw for what I've been doing so that it can be checked over and I can be given some advice on what to do for this? It'd be much appreciated.
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scamtank

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #9 on: October 05, 2014, 10:12:50 am »
Copy-paste the text here between spoiler tags, like I did. That way you won't blow up the page length and everyone is happy.
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The Mighty Dorf

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #10 on: October 05, 2014, 10:24:48 am »
Ok then, here goes:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's the whole raw for my creature. It's not finished yet so obviously some important parts are missing which I'll need to play as it. As mentioned what concerns me is basically the majority of the stuff below the quote:
Quote
Now we'll select all of the hair tissue layers we can find so that we can add colorations to them.  Even if the castes have different tissue layers, it'll find the layers and establish modifiers for each of the castes properly.
I need to figure out how to change the hair related stuff to feather related stuff, basically. The rest is pretty good. Any other stuff you notice, please mention too.
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Suds Zimmerman

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #11 on: October 05, 2014, 11:57:50 am »
First, you need to actually define feathers under materials and tissues, like you did with scales.

Secondly, under the female caste, your [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:BODY_FEATHER_TISSUE_LAYERS] is missing an argument - you should make it [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:BODY_FEATHER_TISSUE_LAYERS:FEATHER] or whatever the tissue is defined as, like in VERTEBRATE_TISSUE_LAYERS.

After that, all you need to do is replace all instances of [SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:HEAD:HAIR] to [SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:ALL:FEATHER] whilst removing all the stuff to do with moustaches and the like. At the same time, you could stand to remove all the things that govern variations in greasiness and other stuff that might not make sense for feathers. You could remove the following bit (or at least the facial hair ones)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

or keep it in if you want them to style their head feathers - though you'd need to add [STYLEABLE] under the feather tissue definitions.
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The Mighty Dorf

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #12 on: October 05, 2014, 12:01:40 pm »
Hey, thanks very much Suds!  :D I'll get right on fixing that stuff and then I guess I'll try testing the thing in Arena and then in the game proper. Of course I'll post how it all goes here. Stay tuned!
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The Mighty Dorf

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #13 on: October 05, 2014, 12:56:04 pm »
Okay, did arena testing and it all looks nice (except the fact that I have yet to confirm the potential paralysing effects of the creature's blood), but the problem I have run into is that I cannot select them as a playable race/creature in Adventure mode despite the fact I gave them the [INDIV_CONTROLLABLE] tag. Is there anything I'm not understanding?
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scamtank

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Re: Help with creating my first playable creature
« Reply #14 on: October 05, 2014, 01:07:31 pm »
You gave them the INDIV_CONTROLLABLE tag? In the new entity definition that you made for them in entity_default.txt?

Did you generate a new world? Civilization data, most of the time, is only applied once during worldgen.
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