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banana

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pancake

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do you know any good resources for hexing tutorials? im trying to get started but it looks very complicated

silverfish makes great video tutorials on youtube! it's really not as complicated as it may seem at first. my recommendation would be to download pet workshop and just play around with the program for a bit, change colors ball sizes etc and get comfortable.

[veepz]

[veepz]

4 Seasons Back Yard Remodel + Crystal Yard

My 4 seasons remodels of the Petz 5 Back Yard are now available for download! And because I went on a bit of a side-quest, I’ve also made a bonus version, a fantasy, crystal back yard!

You can read my creator's notes below:

I somewhat wonder if it's fair to criticize the original Petz 5 playscenes too harshly. It's possible that the development team faced tight deadlines or budget constraints, factors that may not have been entirely within their control. However, regardless of the circumstances, the end result was a disappointingly sloppy product, and it's difficult to ignore some of the glaring flaws. While I can understand that the developers were working with dated software, there are certain flaws that can't be attributed to software limitations. Rather, they seem to reflect a clear lack of attention to detail. Here's what I mean.

The more you look at it, the harder it is to decide which flaw is the worst. The blatant MS paint spray paint "touch-up" in the upper left, that there was no effort put into blending in the skybox, or that they neglected to add textures to the roof.

Alright, enough ranting there. None of this is to say my playscenes are perfect either, but they were a labor of love and I hope that this is evident in the final results.

SPRING

I smoothed out the grass texture to give it a more velvety, manicured lawn appearance. I brightened up the dingy looking fence to a more brighter white. The original playscene had a hole in the fence, and while it might add "character", I opted to cover over it for a more polished look. I added bushes behind the fence to cover up the skybox and to conceal the bottom of the houses.

Speaking of houses. Wow these needed a big work-up. The texture work (or lack of) on these is just bad. I'm no expert in house construction, but even mostly-brick houses will have some accents like trims to break up the monotony of a fully-brick façade.

Because of how fuzzy the brick texture is in the original, I drew in the mortar lines of the bricks to enhance the texture. I added roof shingles, siding, and trim boards to the house to make it look more like a typical suburban house. Despite these edits, it's still not a "great" house - the way it looks through the windows, it looks like the house is one room lol. I wish I could put better houses in the backdrop but because Tinker doesn't allow me to edit the animated blinds, I'm constrained to keeping them the shape that they are. Oh well. We can use our imagination.

I added landscaping rocks to make the flower bed look nicer. I also added some landscaping details like bushes, garden lights, and string lights for ambiance.

[ Enlarged picture of the garden light I made ]

I also worked to improve the skyboxes in all 4 seasons of the of the Back Yard playscenes. It would be lengthy to get into the details of all that but here's a before and after of the night skybox. You got to love them high-quality MS paint stars in the original.

SUMMER

I had a hard time with the summer one because it was hard to come up with ways to make it look different from the spring version. I did make the grass, bushes, and tree leaves slightly more vibrant. Originally I had some flowers by the bushes but I just wasn't really happy with them. At the last minute, I made the decision to remove them entirely. This makes the playscene a little more "plain" but I think some people may want a more "plain", undecorated version so that they can dress it up how they want with toyz.

FALL

Fall is my favorite season, so this was a joy to make. I toned down the color of the grass and added fall landscaping motifs. Recoloring the tree's leaves was done by using Photoshop's gradient map feature. If time permits, I may do a tutorial on this in the future.

Gradient mapping is a powerful tool for recoloring almost anything. It can give way better results than methods such as hue/saturation, replace color, etc. And thanks to photoshop actions, applying this recolor to all the animation frames took just a couple of minutes.

Unfortunately, the fall leaves look "bright" in the nighttime version of the playscene. There does not seem to be a way to implement a darker version of these leaves for the nighttime playscene. If you look at the sprites in Tinker, you'll see that there are two sets of animations for Leaves A, B, and C and they're labeled "PropsAd" and "PropsAn", which would lead you to think that the developers originally intended for there to be a set of leaves for the day time, and a darker set for the night time. I guess the developers scrapped this idea because this does not work in the actual gameplay. When I experimented with this, the game appears to randomly display the nighttime sprite even during the day time, effectively ruining the intended affect. I'm not sure why the developers scrapped this. Either they had issues coding this properly or were just didn't want to put in the effort to make two sets of leaves.

WINTER

Instead of doing recolored leaves for this scene, I made all the leaves transparent and added holiday lighting to the tree. I know the lights aren't perfect - it was kind of hard to make out which direction a branch was going, so it has hard to maintain 'perfect' perspective.

CRYSTAL YARD

This is a bonus playscene that I made because I got a little side-tracked as I was working on the 4 seasons back yards. This is inspired by the Suramar zone from World of Warcraft, so it has a bit of that fantasy, night-elf feel and color scheme. It's been years since I've played WoW but I still appreciate the enchanting aesthetic of the elven zones.

I used gradient mapping again to recolor the leaves to give it this lavender, shimmery, iridescent look. I did a little bit of gaussian blurring and layer effects to make them look a little more "glowy" than the originals.

As before, Tinker won't let me edit the blinds, so it limited what edits I could do to the houses. I would love it if I could have done curtains instead or something. I did my best to make these houses look a little less suburban and more elven. It's not perfect but it was rough working with what I had.

KNOWN ISSUES / THINGS I COULDN'T EDIT

As far as I'm aware, there is no way to turn off the snow effect for seasons like summer where it wouldn't make sense. This probably involves some code-editing that is beyond my technical skillset.

The winter playscene still has the green grass footprint when your petz walk. The sprites for these are not housed within the .env itself but in the Petz 5 Rez.dll file. It would probably involve a bit of tweaking in the code to switch the sprites to something else.

The fall leaves are "bright" in the night time version because there is no way to implement a second, darker set of leaves.

I cannot edit the blinds animation. Tinker gives you an error when you try to edit this sprite. This unfortunately limits what edits I can make to the house and the fence because of where the sprite is positioned.

If anyone does know of solutions to these, do let me know as I'd love to enhance these scenes further!

ICONS

Making the icons for these was also a fun little project. For some odd reason though, the game puts a stray pixel over them when I import them through LnzPro. I did my best to disguise them but there does not seem to be a way to fix that.

BEFORE / AFTER

With all that rambling out of the way, visit my main page over at Magnolia Road > Resources > Playscenes to download the goodies!

[veepz]

Magnolia Road is Moving + Exciting Projects!

Hi there - Rizu here! It's been about a year since I last posted an update here. Life got really busy and pulled me away from Petz. As life calmed down I had the itch to return to some unfinished petz projects! Here's a look at some of the things I've been working on. The major one being the launch of my new home - Magnolia Road on Neocities! Keep reading for more details!

When I first launched this tumblr blog, I wanted a platform that didn't require a whole lot of set-up to get started. While it has served its usefulness as my first home in the Petz community, I need more room for the amount of content that I'm planning on making.

So I've been quietly working on a complete website overhaul and it's been such a blast. I think it will serve me better as a home for my crew and petz content. For the foreseeable future I am planning on keeping this tumblr for long-form write-ups on Petz things.

Without further ado, check it out here.

Not everything on the website is finished but I've put the 'good enough' stamp on it for now. I'm looking forward to fleshing out the pages more with some exciting content.

On that note...

Projects!

Something that I've wanted to do for a while is to create more custom content for Petz 5. Though Petz 4 is the community favorite, I feel Petz 5 has a lot of nostalgic charm and a lot of potential for quality of life upgrades. Despite Petz 5's glitches and bugs, I've by and large have learned to live around them without too much trouble and largely prefer some aspects of Petz 5 over Petz 4, such as the expanded color palette for playscenes, weather, day/night cycles, being able to carry all the toyz with you, etc.

With the new content that I am working on, I hope to inspire some more love for Petz 5 and make it a more welcoming home for your Petz!

So what am I working on? I've been working on a MASSIVE rework of the Petz 5 playscenes. They are quite dated and an eye-store in some instances.

So here's a sneak peek of what I've got going so far. These are not finished yet so these may change a bit!

I'm going for a Luxury Living theme based off of neutral beiges, greys, and gold, with a touch of rococo. I've painstakingly fixed the window sprites (they're a pixelized mess in the original), replaced the garden backdrop with my renovated back yard (see below), and gave the night scene some gentle spot lighting. No more ugly orange floor and yellow fridge.

Continuing on the Luxury Living theme, the family room gets an upgrade.

This one definitely needs more work before it is done but here's my Cozy Cabin themed room.

I've always disliked the original snow scene in that all the trees look like lifeless lumpy snow blobs. I wanted to bring back some greenery and make the scene look more vibrant. I replaced the really bland skyboxes with more realistic skies, with the night scene featuring an aurora borealis.

Inspired by my love for Lilly Pulitzer prints, this beach remodel is a more colorful upgrade over the original. I've recolored the sand to look more like....sand and less like this weird ugly yellow sand the original had. I'm planning to make a daytime one as well.

Salon upgrade. This one is very incomplete, so expect this one to change a bit. The original dresser is so hideous that it's hard to make it look "better".

And finally, perhaps my pièce de résistance and my most time consuming overhaul was the backyard. The original looks so junky with its broken fence, muted colors, and lack of landscaping. It definitely needed some more life to it. I hope I achieved that with my 4 seasons remake of the back yard. To say it was a challenge is an understatement. I had to make 3 versions for EACH season. Day, night, and stormy versions. So 12 BMPs along with the edited leaf sprites. The fall leaves are not stills - they are recolors of the original animated sprites and move in the actual playscene! I was excited to be able to pull this one off and I'm happy with how it turned out.

And lastly I've reworked the Petz 5 carrying case skin with a template that makes it easy to come up with new carrying case skins quickly.

Here's just one of the many carrying case skins that I have planned. This one matches the pattern featured in the beach remodel.

And there you have it! These are all works in progress and I can't wait to share more updates with you all. As always, thank you for stopping by!

[veepz]

Pugbug dancing.

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forest-dweller, a little friend for a new system member

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I brexed up a little of P5 mixie catz! Up for adoption at Petz Show Club!

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if anyone's heard of the 90s computer game "petz", I'm doing an Artists for Palestine-adjacent program where if you show me proof of donation you can buy in-game creations from me.

So if you want something like one of these...

...or dozens of other things I've made as a virtual pet to play with on your computer, download one of the games and then shoot me a message to sort stuff out. Links to the free download, my portfolio, and the official forum thread (not necessary to post in, but may be of interest) will be in reblogs since I'm not sure if all of the links are clear for Tumblr searches.

if you're not interested, please still reblog! this is my only major creative outlet and I know it's niche but I've already had people donate for it so I know there's potential to make a difference.

[veepz]

hexed a great dane :o

[veepz]

I’m looking to get into Petz 4 and I saw that there are a lot of personalities that they can have. I thought your post on the finicky trait was really interesting. Can you link to other posts where you talk about traits or is there a source where I can get an in-depth explanation for the other traits?

i also have a post on the chinchilla persian and its associated "insanity" trait, and i explained a couple in my post about damien's personality values, but i also have a page for this on my site now with a chart listing all of them!

i won't go into all of them here since there's 22 of them, but another pretty interesting one i haven't really posted about yet is confidence, since having it set low is probably the most signature trait of the Orange Shorthair, the breed that Scaredy from the original Catz eventually became, which has predictable effects

(in dogz, it's also responsible for whether they like water or not, since low-confidence dogz will be as scared of getting watered or hit by a wave as catz, but high-confidence dogz enjoy it!)

[veepz]

ELECTRIKITTIEZ now out on the [BAD_DEATH] patreon!

#breedfiles

[veepz]

two new breedfiles on [BAD_DEATH]!