Yup. I’ve had a day. Between my husband’s 16 hour work days and living in a crappy hotel, I’ve had little to do but edit videos and hex Petz stuff.

I put the finishing touches on the Cat Dragon breedfile that I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. I’m not really ready to call this done, but with our move coming up on Tuesday, I’ve run out of time and I wanted to have this ready and online for Christmas.

Next is a Dane hexie. I originally opened up PW this evening to create an entry for pinto’s Christmas Hexing contest on Whiskerwick, but I wound up getting distracted. I have a habit of watching Netflix when I do stuff and I usually wind up getting distracted.

Remember that cat dragon thing I’ve been working on? Well, here’s some progress on it. As you can see, the file now has horns and teeth. Teeth are a variation and can appear as a set of top and bottom, top or bottom or no teeth at all. Same with the horns show. So far, the file can have ram horns, pointed horns, a blend as shown above or no horns at all. Still lots of variations to add, though.

On another, related note, breeding has come along. The file doesn’t breed perfectly (what file does, honestly?) but it’s much better than it was before and I think I can finally leave the grouping and Fur Color Areas, Fur Ball Areas, Fur Area Areas and all that other garbage alone. At least, until I get into spots and stuff *shudder*.

So, I still don’t know what’s causing this file to crash in Petz 4 but it seems to run OK in Petz 5, so work is going to continue there. It seems to be a problem with variations, but that’s all I know right now. At the very least, removing neck length vartiations seems to have helped a little. At least I found a work around, temporary though it may be.

Anyway, I’m taking the sketch that I’ve reposted above and I’m going to break it down into a checklist. Let’s have a look. I’ll be updating this as I go.

• Fluff
  • ✔ Manes
• Back Features
  • ✔ Spines (add to face as well)
  • Web
  • ✔ Fluff (Can exist independent of mane)
• Tail Shapes
  • ✔ Manx
  • ✔ Bobbed
  • ✔ Full
  • ✔ Straight (addball)
  • ✔ Drop (addball)
  • ✔ Curled (addball
• Tail Addons
  • ✔Fluff (Long tails only)
  • End Fluff (Long tails only)
  • ✔Spikes
  • ✔Club
• Horns
  • ✔ Stubby
  • ✔ Ram
  • ✔ Ibex
  • ✔ 2 point forward
  • ✔ 2 point back
  • ✔ 1 point sloping back
  • ✔ 1 point sloping back long
  • Longhorn
• Ears
  • Long Ear
  • Giant Ear
  • Short Ear
  • ✔ Ear Tip Fluff
  • ✔ Inner Ear Fluff
• Facial Features
  • ✔Front Upper Teeth
  • ✔Front Bottom Teeth
  • Back Bottom Teeth
  • Back Upper Teeth
  • Moustache
  • Beard
  • Eyebrows

It seems like I just can’t give up the fight. Try as I might, I can’t seem to produce a breed file that won’t corrupt and crash my game, and yet I’m itching so bad to get back into hexing that I’ve planned out two different files for me to work on.

This first project is intended to go by pretty quickly. It’s a big alligator-headed monster that I want to make, based on a dog. It’s going to be very smooth in the body but have big blocky facial features and a fully detailed mouth(or as fully as I can get it), including a tongue.This is just some brain-storming I’ve done with the cat-dragon variations. I really want this project to work, so I’ve been playing around with different shapes and ideas. I guess I might even have to open up my Virtual Machine to make sure Windows 7 isn’t just messing with the file in some way. I guess we’ll have to see.

In non-hexing news, I got two new dogz in today! I haven’t decided on their names yet, but I’ll be revealing them and adding them to the site as soon as I can.

This breed hexing process is hurting my heart. Try as I might, I just can’t seem to produce a breed file that doesn’t crash my game.

So for now, I’m going to play around with doing hexies the old way – hexing something over an existing breed file and releasing individual petz. I have a VM running Windows XP that I’d like to try to make work too, but I think I might take a break from hexing altogether. Besides, there’s a breeding project I want to try. I’ll have more on that later.

Hello! If you haven’t seen my hexie file progress yet, here it is. It’s a cat-dragon that I’m working on that’s inspired by Lepitaurs and is sort of an exploration for a breeding game idea that’s been knocking around in my brain for the last decade or so.

The basic idea behind this breed is that it’s meant to be a “pet” dragon. Not big enough to ride, not small enough to be a strictly decorative pet like a fish.

I’m pretty happy with the shape of the face now. I still need to mirror the nostril on the other side of the face and I have a lot of variations that I want to add, but the basic shape is pretty much what I’d envisioned when I first sketched these guys out. I’m actually much happier with this shape than with the last attempt’s! Different ear shapes and facial modifications (scales, teeth, gums, etc) are coming soon. Before I tackle that, I still have to get past the neck problem I was having before. This time, I’ve mapped out how long I want the necks to be in the image below.

This is just a mock up, an edited image made up to look like what I want the final product to be. The necks on the last version were a little too long and when I tried to shorten the neck, the game started crashing on me. This time, I’m going the opposite way and making changes to the neck -after- I’ve made changes to the head. I have my fingers crossed this’ll work.

For now, I think the best thing I can do is make a checklist so that I can at least remember to come back to certain things. A checklist is pretty much the best way I can stay organized.

(See future posts for more info)