Female Grendel Sprites in Creatures 1
One of my biggest issues with Creatures 1 Grendels is the way that the females struggle to move about. Anyone who has had a little baby Grendel probably has seen how adorable the females are… Until they start to move! I assumed this was an error in the body data files, and not knowing much about them, I settled to just glance over the problem. After a bit of research and digging, I do believe I’ve solved the problem! It was actually much more simple than a fix needed in the body file: The sprites in the female’s feet were simply mixed up! My test female has been getting around wonderfully well, although I noticed a few other problems. The nice thing about the Grendels is that there are male sprites to compare with, so it’s not as daunting as creating a new breed!
As a test and a challenge, I plan on creating an entirely new set of female Grendel sprites and body data based on the male Grendels. This is not to say that the time and effort put into the current C1 female Grendels deserves any less credit: That actually involved starting from scratch! This is more of a way for me to attempt a little tinkering with sprites and body data. There are a few minor issues with some of the Creatures 1 Norns, and this might be a way for me to make some progress on fixing them.
Would anyone be interested in the updated sprite files for the female baby Grendels? I still think some tinkering is needed, but there has been an obvious improvement in movement! I hope to share my other fixes when they’re a little further along, yet I know this major issue is one which bothers many. I only take credit for rearranging the sprites, not creating anything brand new. We’ll see how this project of mine turns out!
I highly recommend viewing the body data tutorial for an excellent overview of C1 .att files. Believe it or not, these can easily be edited in a simple text editor! The only data is a grid of numbers which translates to the attachment coordinates of the corresponding sprites. It’s not too scary… We’ll have to see how I feel later on!
Hells yes I’d be interested. Since installing the Grendel Mother patch I haven’t had any females yet, so I don’t know how annoying it is. But dodgy graphics really annoy me, so I’d love to see it fixed.
Well that was amazingly quick!
Might the problem with the adult female sprites that Grendel Man mentioned be a similar issue? I’m surprised such a small detail can cause such crazy glitches. You’d think that the two foot sprites would be similar enough to be mostly interchangeable …
I’m definitely interested – I’m sick of having messed-up females, and would love to have baby girls that don’t look so disjointed.
Best of luck solving that BobCOB problem, though – I’m having the same issue with it, and unfortunately have as much as an idea of what’s causing it as you.
ArchDragon: I’m going to figure out a place to host the update, but feel free to send me an e-mail if you’d like it sooner! It’s also not a completely polished version, since I’ve noticed that females have another oddity when moving about. I’m not sure if I caused it, or if this fix just uncovered another issue: It’s a lot better than the original, though!
Crowster: I believe it’s a similar issue. I haven’t yet taken a look, since it was the baby females that seemed to be suffering the most. I’ve also noticed numerous other issues with the sprites that I hope to fix up! My project will hopefully teach me a bit more about how sprites work.
Grendel Man: As with ArchDragon, feel free to send me an e-mail if you would like the updated sprites for the time being. I plan on making other fixes, and although I’m not entirely happy with how the females are moving about, there’s a huge improvement and they don’t seem to limp about anymore! BoBCOB used to work for me perfectly, and then I tried something one day and I got the wonderful type mismatch error. I know it worked much better than the program I’m using now… Hopefully it can be fixed, or someone will know of a way to avoid the pixel problems I’m having!
Amazingly enough, I’ve been working on exactly that for a while now. I had to go through many of the .spr files to arrange them according to the male Grendel’s and use the male’s base .atts for the female. It did require some tinkering with the .atts from there but it wasn’t very difficult.
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/790/grendelfem.png
I think there may be a few more problems remaining but for the most part, she looks alright.
You beat me to it, Razgriz! Looks like you’ve gone and finished this project before I even started it. Ha ha! I still hope to tinker around with the sprites and body data, just so I can learn more about how these work. I’ve already learned a lot with a little effort: There are a few other sprite and body data issues I hope to correct. Your female Grendel looks awesome: Pretty sure many will be clambering to get hold of your work!
I would definitely be interested as well. I just started breeding Grendels for the first time in C1 and was a little horrified to see the baby girl walking about. I thought maybe it was a glitch, so I Googled it and ended up here, haha.
Good ol’ Google! I wanted to try to make a few minor adjustments before releasing the temporary fix: I might also include a couple of other sprite fixes. Hopefully I’ll have that available this week sometime!