07 september 2003

It has recently come to my attention that there is a problem with breedz of mine that someone else has been converting. Specifically, the problem is with breedz that have been converted to Petz 5 at Nicky's Petzfriends site. Quite a few of my breedz are up there under the "converted" sections, and some that look like mine are under the "created" sections. It turned out that things were in a bit of chaos with them. ID numbers have been changed, furfiles are missing, and in some cases the names have been changed. Also there was no acknowledgement of my work on the originals, but that is really a minor issue. The main thing is that these breedz will have been causing distress to many downloaders because they will have crashed the game under certain circumstances.

There is too much hate in the world, without allowing it to interfere with our gentle hobbies of hexing, breeding and playing with petz! So let's not get all screwed up with complaints or accusations; let's just tackle the definite problem here, a problem which needed to be sorted out so that people could enjoy the breedz.

The real problem was not that Nicky had converted my breedz to petz 5; although I would have liked it if she had checked my site first to see if I had Petz 5 versions, I am willing to accept her explanation that she did not know that they were mine. I'm still amazed that people were silly enough to send her breedz to convert such as my monkeys and ratz, which the downloaders must have known I had Petz 5 versions of up at my site!! I released all the versions at once for those breedz. It's particularly silly of them because the ones here are carefully made so that they will speak "monkey" or "rat".

(A note here for anyone who's interested -- I prefer to convert my own breedz, because I have a lot of complicated things in many of my breedfiles, not simply the .lnz sections. If anyone wants a breed of mine converted to another version of the game, please contact me in future; if it's mine and I've not already converted it, I shall do it.)

The problem was also not that she had renamed some of them; I don't like to see my breedz masquerading under different names of course, but that's a personal matter.

The real problem was that her conversions all have a different ID number from the ones that I gave the originals, also some of them were missing essential furfile bitmaps, which means that people who like to import pets from earlier versions of the game and breed them will see the game crashing just as a "happy event" is about to be announced. So, this means that the existence of two different conversions of any given breedfile causes difficulties in the Petz Community, and I keep getting emails from people who want to know how to fix their pets.

Aaaaargh!! That kind of interruption I do not need; my computer-time is already too limited these days.

So a solution has been found that will keep breeders happy and my mailbox less overflowing :-)

Nicky still has the files up at her site, except for a couple which really had to be removed, so that people who swap pets which were originally adopted from her files are not left unable to breed them. She has a link to my site under any of the breedz which are obviously mine, so that people who have adopted a pet from one of my older versions of the game or have downloaded one from the Internet can find a proper conversion that will work at my site. Finally, she has a warning "agreement" at her site about possible difficulties using her conversions of other people's breedz.

Note that if you want my various species or fantasy pets (particularly for instance the Horse) to have the correct sounds, you should really download my proper conversions of my breedz. You can download the sounds for my breedz at this site, "Carolyn's Creations", of course.

Note also that you will not be able to breed a pet from one of the conversions from Nicky's site with one adopted from an original same-name breedfile at my site unless you do a clever trick to fool Windows. For instance, take the Monkey. If you want to have a pet adopted from the version downloaded from Nicky's site in your game and you want to breed it with one adopted from my proper one, rename the breedfile from her site to this:

Monkey.catNicky

(You can rename it by right-clicking on it in My Computer or Windows Explorer and choosing "Rename". No need to open it in a hex editor or anything -- just rename the file.)
Then you can run my Monkey.cat in the game as well as Monkey.catNicky. The pets will both come out with no problems, and will breed -- at least, they do on my Windows 95 system; if they don't on any different operating system you have, then I cannot help you.

Finally, about the cat breedz which look like mine under Nicky's "created" section. I am happy to accept her explanation regarding the Angora cat. The Himalayan -- people, forget it. There are a lot of Himalayans on the Internet; I agree that one of the ones at Nicky's site looks very like mine, but mine is based on a Siamese and the ones at her site are not.

I hope this sorts things out and that we can all co-exist in peace, helping each other out where necessary and having a good time.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Horn