Basic .pet or .baby file editing.
=================================

Baby files and pet files are written to by the game, if they are 
in the "Adopted" directory, every time you run the game.  Stored 
in these small files are all the information on the shape and colour 
as well as the personality, mood, and every other item that can 
change when you play with your adoptees.  Each time the game writes 
to these little files, there is a tiny possibility that it may corrupt 
the file.  So _please_ everyone -- keep backup copies of your petz 
or babyz at every important stage in their lives.  And never, ever 
hex-edit one without first making a safe copy.

To copy your pet or baby, use Windows Explorer or My Computer to 
navigate to the game's Adopted Petz or Adopted Babyz directory.  
Right-click on any files that are in there and drag-and-drop (choosing 
"copy) to any other directory that you choose on your hard drive.

Okay, now you want to hex edit your pet or baby.  You will perhaps 
have seen my tutorials so far and been confused by them; don't panic.  
First off you need to get a hex editor.  This isn't so very hard, 
there are loads which you can find and download for free from the 
internet; just go to www.google.com and enter Freeware "Hex Editor" 
into the search box.  You'll see loads to choose from.  Don't try
to edit baby or pet files in Reshacker or any other Resouurce Editor;
petz and babyz are save-game files, not resource files, and cannot be
edited except with a hex editor.

For pet or baby editing, it's best to get one which has a "calculate 
checksum" facility.  Hex Workshop has this facility; it's not freeware, 
it's shareware and available from http://www.bpsoft.com/ There are 
probably others that can do this also, but Hex Workshop is the one 
I use at present.

So, when you've got your hex editor, practise using it on unimportant 
things for a while just so that you get used to it -- exactly as you 
would with any tool.  Most hex editors' interface are arranged in much 
the same way; there is a left-hand pane with numbers which start at 
the top at 00.  This is the "address" area, i.e. it shows you how 
many bytes down the file your cursor has been placed.  Then there 
is a wider, central pane; this displays the data that makes up the 
file which has been opened in the hex editor, and it shows that data 
in hexadecimal numbers.  Then there is a narrower pane on the right-
hand side, and this contains the hex editor's best attempt to show 
all the bytes in the form of ASCII characters.  Some characters have 
no ASCII equivalent, and for those the hex editor may show dots or 
spaces or weird characters.

When you've got used to the interface on your hex editor, _then_ 
you can open a baby or pet file into it and try to do some 
editing -- although it's best if you start by editing something 
a little easier, such as clothes for the game.

How to hex edit a .pet/.baby file
=================================

You can so very easily corrupt a pet or baby unless you know exactly what 
you're doing.  The problem is that for these files, you have to not 
only make sure that the file stays exactly the same length, but also 
that the checksum remains the same.  I repeat what I say above; 
make sure you keep a backup copy of your precious pet or baby file 
before you start.

As I say above you need a hex editor, and one that will give you a 
checksum for a selected area of a file is pretty much essential if 
you're going to do a lot of changes unless you're good at juggling 
numbers in your head.  Hex Workshop has a "generate checksum" feature, 
and if you look around the Internet you will doubtless find other 
editors which will do the job.  In Hex Workshop you can press the 
F12 key to get it to calculate checksums; I don't know how other 
editors do it.

Let's suppose that you want to change the colour of your petz' or 
babyz' eye.  The part you want to edit starts with pfmagic (in babyz) 
or p.f.magic (in petz) and continues on with a texture list and then 
a _load_ of numbers etc.  Where the numbers stop and null bytes start 
(that's where the hexadecimal-numbers pane shows a lot of 00 numbers) 
is the end part of the relevant data.  So, the area that you want to 
find: 

in the babyfile starts very like this:

00006896 | 0000 00F8 0000 0000 0000 0070 666D 6167 | ...........pfmag
00006912 | 6963 3100 5B54 6578 7475 7265 204C 6973 | ic1.[Texture Lis
00006928 | 745D 0A5C 6172 745C 6175 746F 6275 696C | t].\art\autobuil
00006944 | 645C 6861 6972 332E 626D 7020 3120 3235 | d\hair3.bmp 1 25

or in the petfile starts very like this:

00001750 | 00F8 0000 00F8 0000 0000 0000 0070 2E66 | .............p.f
00001760 | 2E6D 6167 6963 7065 747A 4949 4900 5B54 | .magicpetzIII.[T
00001770 | 6578 7475 7265 204C 6973 745D 0A5C 6172 | exture List].\ar

What you want to do is to highlight the whole of the pet's text/numbers 
data section, from .magic1 or .magicpetzIII to the end of the numbers, 
which will look something like this -- remember, these are only examples, 
they are a baby and a Scottie pet of mine, your pet or baby's data will 
be a little different:

in my baby:

00025312 | 3736 3137 3220 2D30 2E32 3736 3137 3220 | 76172 -0.276172 
00025328 | 2D30 2E39 3230 3537 3520 3437 202D 3120 | -0.920575 47 -1 
00025344 | 3020 2D31 202D 3120 2D31 2030 0A00 AACC | 0 -1 -1 -1 0....
00025360 | BB03 B406 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 | ................

in my pet:

000047F0 | 436F 6C6F 7220 4172 6561 735D 0A31 2034 | Color Areas].1 4
00004800 | 3820 3020 3120 3320 3420 350A 3220 3334 | 8 0 1 3 4 5.2 34
00004810 | 2072 616D 7062 6173 653A 2031 2032 0A00 |  rampbase: 1 2..
00004820 | AACC BB03 CB1A 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 | ................

and then it's a good idea to calculate the checksum of this section.  
Make a note of it.  If your hex editor doesn't have that feature, then 
you're going to have to keep a note of exactly what numbers you change 
and to what they are changed.

The whole point with this checksum business is that when you change 
one byte in the .pet or .baby file, you must change another one to 
compensate.  So if I change a "1" to "4" then I must remove 3 from 
some other number, "9" to "6" for instance.  And it's very easy to 
get this wrong; checking the checksum as you go will help keep you 
on track.

Don't be confused by this business of decreasing or increasing numbers.
Each individual character is separate and must be compensated for
separately.  For instance, if you change an eye colour number from 77 
to 25, you need to compensate by increasing numbers elsewhere by five and 
two (7-2=5, 7-5=2) _not_ by fifty-two (77-25=52)!

You can of course find what you want in there and edit it in the hex 
editor itself,  where the eye colour for instance (in my example pet -- 
it's done the same way in the .baby file) would be, in the [Ballz Info] 
section, the "2" here:

000028E0 | 0A32 3434 2032 2030 2030 2034 2037 202D | .244 2 0 0 4 7 -
000028F0 | 3120 310A 3335 2032 3520 3020 3520 3020 | 1 1.35 25 0 5 0 

An explanation: find the [Ballz Info] section by doing a find or search 
for [Ballz Info] in your hex editor.  Note that the dot in front of the 
244 is 0A in the hexadecimal pane; this a "line feed" character and 
shows you that 244 is the first number on this particular line.  The 
first number in a line is the colour of the ball, and the second number 
is the outline.  Since you are editing eye colour, what you are really 
editing is the outline colour of the iris.  Therefore in this example 
I am changing the "2".

I want my Scottie to have one blue eye, so I change that 2 to 4 
(hex 34):

000028E0 | 0A32 3434 2034 2030 2030 2034 2037 202D | .244 4 0 0 4 7 -

Now I need to reduce another number by 2.  It needs to be a number 
that doesn't make any real difference to the look of my pet or baby.  
So I find the [Paint ballz] section, which you can be pretty sure to 
find in any normal pet or baby file.  Remember that the numbers in 
your pet or baby will be a little different from the ones in my 
example, as of course yours will have different size and colour 
ballz.  But here's the start of my Scottie's [Paint ballz]:

00002CF0 | 5061 696E 7420 4261 6C6C 7A5D 0A39 2035 | Paint Ballz].9 5
00002D00 | 3220 3020 302E 3935 3738 3236 2030 2E32 | 2 0 0.957826 0.2

now, 0.957826 is the diameter of the paint ball and is just a fraction 
of the simple number "1" -- all six of the numbers after the period 
or point are decimal-place numbers, and the ones near the end can be 
changed without making any noticeable difference.  So I can reduce the 
6 at the end of it by 2 -- 0.957826 changes to 0.957824.

Remember the best place always to compensate for altered numbers is in 
the Paint Ballz section, where no-one is going to notice a change in those 
long strings of numbers beyond the decimal points.  You can use other
numbers, such as linez thicknesses or outline colours etc to compensate
if your file has no Paint Ballz, but you do need to know which numbers
you're editing.  See the "TIP" section below for more details.

Remember that the petfile has two copies of everything in this 
text/numbers data section -- two [Ballz Info], for instance.  This 
is because it uses the data from the lower of the two copies (from 
the second texture list onwards) for when it is a puppy or kitten, 
and the upper of the two copies for when it becomes fully adult.
If you're changing colours, the game will only pay attention to those
in the adult part, so make sure it's the adult, or first, part that
you edit.  But for sizes etc it will allow differences between
the two, so you can make changes between the two if you wish.

Babyz also have two copies, presumably because there was an aborted 
attempt by P.F.Magic to make babyz grow, and I mention in other,
advanced "howto"s ways of making the "baby" and "adult" sections work
the way they do in Petz.

TIP  (don't read this if alternative ideas/solutions confuse you)
=================================================================

You can "cheat" a little to make it easier, as I have done sometimes when
a lot of stuff needs editing in a .pet or .baby file, and copy all the 
data section out into a new file, saved as (for example) "xxx.txt".  Then 
open it in Wordpad, _not_ Notepad this time because Notepad changes null 
bytes to spaces and Wordpad doesn't if you remember to save as text.  
(Of course, if you have downloaded the free Programmers' File Editor, 
that's even better: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe )

Voila!  You see it all laid out in columns, and if you compare it to the 
relevant .lnz file (extracted from the appropriate breedfile as shown 
in my other tutorials, or taken from my easy-edit kits) you'll see which 
line of numbers relates to which ball etc.  You can then alter whatever 
you want -- but remember to keep a note of what you've changed.  And you
_must_ save as text, because otherwise Wordpad will corrupt the file.

TIP 2 -- when your pet or baby has no Paint Ballz
==================================================

Actually this is quite advanced hexing, but I put it here for completeness.
So, what if you want to change its eye or eyelid colour... but the .pet 
(or .baby) file doesn't HAVE a paintballz section?  where do you change it?  
Okay...   

That's trickier and requires that you understand what you're looking at 
inside the file. With complex stuff I copy the .lnz out into a new file in 
the hex editor, save it as petlnz.txt, and open it in Wordpad -- not Notepad 
this time, Wordpad. Then I can see it laid out properly and see which number 
is which, changing numbers carefully. Say you have a pet with 244 eyelid and 
you want to change to 62:  

We start of course by removing the 4 from the end of 244, and increasing the 
4 to 6, shifting it to in front of the 2, so that we just have an adjustment 
of 2 to make to an existing number as well as adding that extra 4 in 
somewhere:  

[256 Eyelid Color]  
244 -1  

changed to  

[256 Eyelid Color]  
62 -1  

Now, in linez, near the bottom we have:  

45 46 9 -1 244 244 100 100 0 0  
46 47 9 -1 244 244 100 100 0 0  
47 48 9 -1 244 244 100 100 0 0  
3 2 5 -1 244 244 95 95 0 0  
6 2 5 -1 244 244 95 95 0 0  

From the breedfile we see that in Linez the number columns are as follows:  
startball, endball, fuzz, colour, Lfcolour, Rtcolour, sThick, eThick, and 
then in the petfile there are two extra columns which usually contain zeroes 
and which it's wise to leave alone.  

Right! A couple of lines are only 95 thick, so we can add a 4 onto one of
those and reduce a 5 by 2, so as to get this:  

6 2 5 -1 244 244 95 934 0 0  

which would fix the size and the checksum. All okay as far as it goes, but that
would produce a dreadful thick line which would "draw" on the screen at certain
times when the pet moves (remember we've changed the thickness of the line at 
one end)  

so you want to cut that down and spread it out a bit amongst the other outlines.
I'd do that by changing the lines thus:  

45 46 9 -1 244 244 100 104 0 0  
46 47 9 -1 244 244 100 104 0 0  
47 48 9 -1 244 244 100 103 0 0  
3 2 5 -1 244 244 95 95 0 0  
6 2 5 -1 244 244 95 104 0 0  

See? Spreading the load, as it were, by reducing the 934 to 104 and increasing
three 100s to 104, 104, and 103. It's not as simple as when you've got paint
Ballz to fool around with, but so long as you bear in mind what exactly it is 
that you're making larger or smaller, it all works out okay.  

When you don't have [Paint Ballz], it really depends on the individual pet 
or baby as to what exactly you can change without it looking wrong. 

But I hope that helped

Enjoy

Carolyn Horn