I’m trying to figure out how to create my own skins. I know this is a time consuming process so I decided to start simple with a plant. 
So far I’ve managed to create a plant, the icons, and the resource file, but I can’t figure out how to put it all together.
I have looked over the docs, searched the newsgroups and this forum and I can’t find any solid examples. Has anyone out there successfully created custom skins for a plant?
I can get the plant to upload just fine, but it always uses the default bitmap.
Any and all help is appreciated,

Thanks,

Eric

Just drop your plant bmp into your Terrarium directory.  To you the plan will look *pretty* to others it will use a default skin.  Note plant bmps are only a couple of textures.  I recommend making a:

SkinName24.bmp
SkinName30.bmp
SkinName36.bmp
SkinName42.bmp
SkinName48.bmp

This will give the illusion of your plant growing.  When the source release happens and I drop the new 2D in 3D graphics engine (I'll be releasing two of my own private engines to work on the source release), you'll just need to convert these to .png files, and you'll be able to add animations effects if you wish but I'll talk more on that when I see the source release hit the web.

So basically its only possible to skin a plant on your local system right?

I'll give it a shot.

Thanks for your reply.

Eric

For the most part, Yes.  Others will need the same bitmaps you have in order to have them show up on their machines.  I plan on releasing a skin sharing web service and client the service fairly soon though.  So then you'd be able to share your skins with the world, and they could decide which ones they wanted and which they don't.

You can code your skins into an assembly which would basically embed them into your animal. Dropping the files into the correct firectory is somewhat of a hack to test your skins.

Can you please tell me how to go about embeding the images in the animal's DLL?  Or point me to some documentation that describes this.

Thanks

I have the same problem. I have followed the advanced developer guide right up to the point of having created a DLL with the bmp's in. From there things are fuzzy. There are no code examples on how to use these images.

The docs simply state that the engine will look for the bmp's in the plantResources.dll file.

I have even tried the hack of copying all 26 bmp's into the terrarium folder with ant and the other bmps. No go.

Could someone please give a step by step of how to reference your bitmap resource dll in code.

BTW the plant skin is a cactus (no surprise) with 26 states sizes.  I would share it with the community if I can get it to work...

Please help.

Plant is called Cactus, resources in Cactus.dll, using C# in VS 2003.

BTW I created Cactus.dll by first creating a .res file and compiling that, not an resx file. Will this be a problem?

J

I've never messed with skinning, but from your comments it would seem that you should put your bitmaps in a DLL named CactusResources.dll then drop that DLL where Terrarium can find it (in the same folder as the EXE?)  If that doesn't work, I might try to investigate it when I get some time (Monday?).  I've been wondering what enhancements I could make to my server and a Critter Skin repository might be fun.