

Okay, drop tails seem to be a regularly recurring problem for people, 
so here's a "howto" that I hope will help.

Included in this zipfile is a test Dogz 3 breedfile which is a Labrador, with a
downward-pointing tail of unusual colouring so that you can see what has happened
to each ball.  This breedfile has been stripped of its sounds so as to decrease 
its size for downloading, and it _WILL_ overwrite your Labrador breed, so remember 
to keep a backup of your original if you use this. If you have a different version 
of the game and you want to see the dog, then just  copy the .lnz section of this 
file into a copy of your game's labrador.dog file. After all, you are a hexer, aren't you :-)

Just a note as to my editing methods so that with any luck all that I go on about in
most of my tutorials or "howto"s will make sense.  
This is my method: open the breedfile into Hex Workshop (or some other true hex
editor -- not VIM, and _definitely_ _not_ Wordpad).  Search for the text string 
[Little one] and place your cursor in front of it.  Scroll down and select from 
there to the end of the .lnz section, which finishes with PFM_[V2.001] (c) 1997 PF. 
Magic, Inc.  Choose "copy" from the drop-down edit menu.  Now open a new, empty file 
from the drop-down file menu in the hex editor.  Place the cursor in it and choose 
Paste from the edit menu.  Save it as breed.txt.  Now open breed.txt in Notepad. 
This is the .lnz section of the breedfile (or .clz section of a clothes file),
which _is_ actually itself a small text file.
And for people who wonder what to do with it when you've finished editing it; well, 
you open it in the hex editor again, check that it's the same size as it was before, 
and then copy/paste it over the same place whence it came!

Right, on with how to make a drop tail.  I'm going to use a Labrador as the base here
but if I can make you understand what you're doing, you should be able to go on to
make drop-tails on any breed.  Remember that things look a little different in
the various different breedz, but the same principles apply in all of them:

1) The distances between tail balls need to be adjusted in a negative direction,
and they need also to be set at suitable distances away from the belly ball in
order to prevent the tail from being wagged through the body.  You want the 
[Project Ball] section for this

2) In some cases you may wish to move some of the tail ballz down slightly from
their normal positions relative to the butt.  You want the [Move] section for this.

3) You may find that some ballz are listed under [Omissions]; you will probably want
to bring those ballz back into service, and if you do so you will need to remove them
from [Omissions] and join them up to their neighbouring tail ballz in [Linez].

4) Some breedfiles have added tail ballz, such as the Great Dane; the Labrador also
has one added ball.  Such ballz can be useful in making the tail flexible, and you
may want to play around with them, maybe adding some of your own.  To simplify this
"howto" I am removing any such ballz from [Add Ball], but if you want to keep or add
any such ballz, remember to adjust their x,y,z co-ordinates (as well of course as 
colour, fuzz and size), and make sure that they are connected up right in [Linez].

5) The tail ball sizes and fuzz amounts will probably need to be altered in [Ballz
Info] to give the effect you want.

6) Finally, you will have to check that the breedfile doesn't have different [Move],
[Project Ball], or Fuzz or Ball Size Overrides in the puppy section of the .lnz (the 
part which comes below the [Ballz info] section).

So, on to specifics.  Open your labrador's .lnz file and look for [Project Ball].  
Below that you'll find the tail data of the labrador:

;tail
57, 58, 60
58, 59, 100
59, 60, 100
59, 94, 70

This tells the game that ball 57 is distant by 60 units from ball 58 and so on.  You 
want to tell the game that the tail ballz are distant from each other in a downward 
direction (hence a minus number) and then you want to tell it to keep the tail balls 
a suitable distance from the belly ball, because otherwise the end of the tail will 
wag through the belly of the dog.  I know that some of these lines, especially the 
ones which specify the distance of the belly to the tail ballz, are not already in 
the Labrador's [Project Ball] section, so you're going to have to add them as well 
as changing what's already there. So you want to have in that section, instead of the 
above, something like this:

;TAIL
57, 58, -18
58, 59, -18
59, 60, -20
60, 61, -20
61, 62, -20
48, 58, 110
48, 59, 130
48, 60, 145
48, 61, 165
48, 62, 180

You can of course vary these distances to suit the effect that you want, increasing 
the distances between some ballz and decreasing others.  But the above is a good place
to start.

Now then, the two tail ballz 57 and 58 are naturally set a little high relative to the
butt to look good in a drop tail.  So you want to add them into the [Move] area and 
set them lower.  I've chosen 15 as a good distance down for them to be:

57,	0, 15, 0
58,	0, 15, 0

(Remember, in [Move], a larger positive number in the up/down column is further downward,
and a larger negative number is further upward.)

Two of the Labrador's tail ballz are unused; for some reason the makers decided it was
better that way.  So for a nice luxuriant down-pointing tail, put them back by removing 
these from [Omissions]:

62
61

I'm making the tail relatively simple for the purposes of this "howto", so remove this, 
from [Add Ball]

;tail ball94
58, 	0, 	0, 	0, 	95, 	21, 	0, 	5, 	5, 	-1, 	34, 	0,          0,		0 

Of course the Linez section has the ballz connected to each other in sequence as well as to 
the butt ball -- something you need to remember to check on.  If you're using a Great Dane as a base 
and not keeping the Add Ballz (in the GD, the added tail ballz are connected in between each 
of the normal tail ballz), you have to be careful about this also.  Anyway, in my example Labrador,
since you've removed an added tail ball and are replacing the normal end-of-tail ballz, you'll 
need to change this, in [Linez], from:

58, 	94, 	2,	-1,	28, 	28,	100,	100		;tail/butt
94, 	59, 	2,	-1,	28, 	28,	100,	100		;tail/butt

to this:

57, 	58, 	3,	-1,	28, 	28,	100,	100
58, 	59, 	2,	-1,	28, 	28,	100,	100
59, 	60, 	2,	-1,	28, 	28,	100,	100
60, 	61, 	2,	-1,	28, 	28,	100,	100
61, 	62, 	2,	-1,	28, 	28,	100,	100

and you need to do that for all the variations that you choose to keep in the file 
(#1;golden body etc).

After that, you only have to change ball sizes and fuzz in the [Ballz Info] section, and maybe 
fuzz in the [Linez] section, to get the effect you want.

One final thing, though, in the Labrador -- this particular breed _does_ have stuff in the
puppy area that will affect the look of the pet as it comes out of the Adoption Centre.
You need to insert or alter the same data in [Move] and [Project Ball] that you had above,
in the adult section, and you need to make sure that the [Ball Size Override] and 
[Fuzz Override] is the way you want it for the tail ballz 57-62.

Happy tail-flipping

Carolyn Horn

