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SáT

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Quote from: Schulmanator on 08-03-2007, 10:29:31

I think it would be great to have ploppable wild animals, like giraffes, zebras, lions, etc. I always hope when I put them in in God mode they will appear in game, but they never do. I would enjoy seeing a variety of animals.

Okay, I may not offer the ploppable exotic animals here, but am I right to assume that you mostly just want to see exotic animals trotting around? In that case, here you go:

Exotic animals are never created by the wildlife generator. That's why they never appear in the game. But this can be helped all right.

The wildlife generator is in the aptly named wildlife.lua (located in the simcity_1.dat). The generator's first row says that automata = { "deer", "bear", "horse", "moose","llama" }", missing the exotic stuff. The missing animal automata, however, are all defined in the constants_sit.lua. A quick & dirty patch will ensure the exotic animals are all generated in the game. In other words, rhinos roam 'round the city.

If you have ever touched the Reader, you'll be able to tweak the values (i.e you can make it so your cities generate nothing but giraffes): open the .dat, and in the lua inside, simply enter the desired animal's name in the automata array. Possible animals that I'm aware of are: deer, bear, horse, moose, llama, chimp, elephant, giraffe, lion, rhino and polar_bear ("and there may be many others but they haven't been discovered"), but the polar_bear is outright bugged (AFAIK). Anyhow, you may also consider changing the amount of animals generated. The original may be a bit too low for the fun, if realistic.

Link to the plugin

The usual caveats: this may conflict with other modded wildlife.luas; it works for me, but may not work for you; etc, etc, etc. And, well, this all may be common knowledge since ages. I'm new to this, you know  .

As for the ploppability, at least some semi-ploppability... well, here I'm risking I may seem like the naive & angry youngster stubbornly going against the advice of his wise elders, but... Well, anyhow, as I see it, the reason the animals go off and fade off plopped lots is that fauna are avoid_lots=true, meaning that "automaton will fade out as soon as it detects it's on a lot". The "timeout=60" is also suspicious: a quick observation makes me think animals do fade off after roughly 60 seconds. Anyhow, what if we created the new automata group "tame_fauna", without these restrictions; and what if we tied a generator and an attractor to a certain lot through the use of custom properties, perhaps? Absolutely stupid?

SáT

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Quote from: sam on 15-03-2007, 19:28:19

Yes I'm surprised there are no sheep. But if what SáT is saying is correct you could have a different LUA mod for say African animals, and maybe one for north american etc if ther are enough animal automata.

Absolutely. Badsim, just download the dat I posted above, and edit the lua so that the automata array lists the animals you wish to see.

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I think there might be a kangaroo somewhere too.

Yes, but the kangaroo is missing a "walking" model. Or maybe it's just not named corrrectly, or missing a texture. Either way, it's just a floating shadow that occasionally switches into a kangaroo looking around, then disappears as the "walking" animation is called. Worse, it's part of a group named something else (I believe the quick&dirty patch of mine actually calls the faulty kangaroo automata -- sorry about that, it's Maxis' fault; I should find the kangaroo exemplar to fix that.)

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But I'm interested in knowing where the whales are. I would like to be able to have whales appear more often or in more shallow water for example. But they seem to be different to the other animals and I can't find them.

My guess is, they're effects, not automata. Same for the eagles and the seagulls. But this is just a guess.

Anyhow, we could most certainly create a more realistic wildlife. The automata model is quite powerful indeed. Herds are entirely possible, for example: basically, we create a leader set to random_walk (or something more specific), then set that leader to attract animals of the same kind. Stampede! We can also create animals at night, who are then attracted to garbage cans and venture into light residental areas. We could create hunters shooting animals (and each other). Heck, we could (theoretically) create animals who are attracted to a chemical plant, drink the industrial waste and turn into sim-eating monsters. We could entirely deviate from the Maxis model of wildlife-generators (that seems massively unfinished anyways: why can we plop exotic animals in God mode if the generator we place is the same as the others?). But at the very least, we could separate the animals and tweak the frequency of their appearance so that deer will be more frequent than bears (or whatever is realistic. I'm a city boy, actually; perhaps that's why I'm attracted to these absolutely rural things. Ever told you I'm working on a cowboy vehicle? But I digress...). There are limitations, of course, and some issues about performance (i.e. we don't want too many automata); it requires attention and some care, that's all. Oh, and we can create new animals all right: we only need the animated models (which is not something I'm capable of creating, but I'm certain someone around here is; though I'm not sure if they want to waste their talent on modelling sheep ).

I'll look into the matter, then report back about the findings (SáT said, and he was never seen again)

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Badsim, those are effects indeed. Maxis did not put the things easy for the lotters about effects, and most of the effects DO NOT show in the Lot Editor  BUT, you can extract any effect from the core dat files, and make them useable for the LE....just check that file:

JRJ Rural Culverts And Water Effects

JRJ-If you check the file that I linked before for Badsim, you can see some new exemplar declarations, ( clones from existing exemplars), which I made, copying one existing exemplar and changing the Instance ID. ( dont use the range I used, please  )

After that, you point the effec to to the exemplar by the effect's name. No more, no less.

You can find all the effects names in the effectdir file.

The effectsdir is a very complex file,there is really very little information about that file...I am sure that all the effects are set to show at determinated times of the day/year, and also to show under determined circumstances only....if we could have the full documentation about that file...

This is all the information I am aware of:

http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=EFFDIR

....if someone could have a look and see if a decrypting tool would be feasible....some codemaster....

Untamed wildlife

« on: 17-03-2007, 07:45:14 »

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Quote from: SáT on 17-03-2007, 07:45:14

The behaviour of animals is currently limited to walking randomly for 60 seconds, then fading off. While this is actually quite awesome for animals intended to provide a pleasant background effect (glimpsing a deer walking in the forest is fun), I wouldn't mind having animals showing some more realistic behaviour (and here I mean herds), or programmed to do certain tasks (like going off to drink from Peg's ponds). I tend to call the latter "actors", and I certainly plan to make some. I'm also toying with the idea of persistent animals, meaning that they'd remain active for much longer than now; that may have some issues, though.

But either way, to kickstart this thing, I decided to make a much more basic thing, viz. a modular plugin that allows you to easily customize what kind of animals should be generated in your city. Get it here. To install, install the pompously named wildlife_master.dat and one or more of the files from the "Animals" folder. And that's it. Not playtested very vigorously, it's pretty much in beta. It comes with all the standard and exotic animals, and a fixed kangaroo and polar bear to boot. I used the GUID of 9625 to group the animals.

Any feedback is appreciated. Suggestions and requests are welcome too, but bear in mind I can't do any modelling.

For herd behaviour the best place to look would probably be riot.lua as it defines leader and follower behaviours.  Theoretically (and it is just theory as I've not experimented with lua scripts except to strengthen the stadium attractor) you should be able to create a fauna generator lot for the herd and a fauna attractor lot as a target to create a herd migration.

Daeley is the LUA expert, but certainly generators/attractors/repulsors seems to be an area that hasn't really been explored fully yet (unless I've just not noticed!).

Just a quick addition to this ...

I just dropped your wildlife mod into my plugins and then created a lot with the 'fauna_generator' occupant group, at the times defined in the wildlife_master script I had all sorts of animals appearing around the generator lots (including kangaroos and polar bears).

When I get time I'll take a look at the attractor side of the equation.  maxis.lua (Building: Maxis occupant group) already attracts sims and llamas, so if I use your mod together with my generator lot to create a variety of animals and I can get a boosted maxis.lua to pull all the llamas to it, then there's the start of migration behavior.  Or cows that go to be milked at certain times of the day.