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[Zhikse]

So I've been dipping my toes in the magma smelter that is DF modding -ouch!- and hacking away madly at a creature file of my own. Halfway through it, I decided it would look cool if I added some selective fur patches, and the end result is a creature that has both HEAD_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS and a modified version of BODY_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS applied.

This lets me set different colors for different bodyparts, control the length and growth independently and all that. But it feels a bit... tacky? It's something I cobbled together by comparing the raws of a bunch of creatures and I was wondering if there's a better way of doing it. Also there's the possibility of having hair AND fur in the same spot, applying two different HAIR layers which might get funky; or fur and scales and feathers if you want to make a nice dinosaur-looking creature. There's a lot of possibilities, but it looks like it's stretching the token system a bit and idk if the game will like that.



Also apologies for any issues with formatting, this is the first time I'm posting in a proper forum instead of lurking

[Eric Blank]

You can get away with only using the fur layers, and in the color description refer to the fur on the head as hair saying "their [hair] is (color)"

It shouldn't cause problems besides the second tissue/material layer by the same ID overwriting the first.

You can also apply fur and hair explicitly to only parts of the body you want them on, just as nail tissues are added.

[brewer bob]

Eric's suggestion is what I've been doing. Much of DF flavor comes from text, so it doesn't really matter that much if the local tissue isn't actually that color (e.g., werebeasts don't have any defined colors - there's only a written description of them).

Here's an example from a blue tit's colors I did for my personal mod:

Code: [Select]

[SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:ALL:FEATHER]
[TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:YELLOW_GREEN:1]
[TLCM_NOUN:feathers:PLURAL]
[SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:HEAD:FEATHER]
[TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:AZURE:1]
[TLCM_NOUN:head:SINGULAR]
[SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:CHEEK:FEATHER]
[PLUS_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:NECK:FEATHER]
[TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:STRIPES_DARK_BLUE_WHITE:1]
[TLCM_NOUN:cheeks and neck:PLURAL]
[SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:WING:FEATHER]
[TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:BLUE:1]
[TLCM_NOUN:wings:PLURAL]
So, the creature description will say something like:

"His feathers are yellow-green. His head is azure. His cheeks and neck are striped dark blue and white. His wings are blue."

[Zhikse]

Oh damn yeah, I could've just put all the hair layers in one plan and save myself some trouble.

Checking the files, I realize I did make use of the naming trick, making hair and fur have separate colors so they'd both show up in the description. I'd just have to add two lines from HEAD_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS to the custom plan so it doesn't count the whole head as covered in hair and it'd be good to go. I might try using SELECT_TISSUE_LAYER in the creature file instead of SET_TL_GROUP too, see if that works better than changing the body detail plan.

Now the only issue I'd have left would be the description itself. Is there anything that determines the order in which each element shows up? Or that dictates which traits get bunched up together, instead of mentioning the same body part multiple times? Maybe that's not something that can be modified in the raws and it just pulls from preexisting strings of text, but if there's a chance of reducing the clutter in descriptions I'll take it.