A: Go straight to the Santa Project page and click on both sets of four pictures. You have to download the sprites and body data files in order for your Santa Norns to look like Santa Norns. Make sure you follow the README.TXT files that are zipped in with the sprites. They tell how to install the Santa Norns sprites and body data.
A: When you install the Christmas pac after loading my santa sprites, it replaces the baby stage sprites and body data files with the original adult stage sprites named for the baby stage. You'll have to re-install my baby stage sprites (all sprites that say x003.spr, where x is a letter from A to L). You'll also need to reinstall the baby stage body data files (x003.att) as well. The female sprites will be just fine, since there is no female santa from Cyberlife.
A: Yes, it did. Although I don't have any actual figures, I'd say that it took somewhere between 20 and 40 total hours to edit and assemble the male and female Santa norns. And so far, I've probably spent at least 10 hours on the Bunny norn.
A: Sorry, but my time is pretty much spoken for right now. Besides working full time and also trying to do the rest of the Bunny Norn sprites and the Santa 97 Norn sprites, I'm also a free-lance game designer and writer. Also, there are only 2 slots left open for creature varieties now. (There can only be 10 total, and there are 8 already.) My feeling is that we need to come up with something really unique to fill those last two spots.
A: In a nutshell, I first start with an existing set of sprites. For the santas, I used the Horse Norns, and for the Bunny Norn, I used the Fox Norns. I copy the files to another folder and rename each file with the new name. For more information on sprite files and how they are named, check out the Creatures Sprites file on Slink's Burrow Online. I then used COE (Creatures Object Editor - available from Slink's Burrow Online) to save each individual picture of each sprite as a bitmap (.BMP) file. (Note: there are 12 sets of sprites. Each sprite, except for the head, has 10 images in it. The head has 26. That's 136 different images to edit! For EACH stage of life!) I used Paint Shop Pro to edit each image. Then I used LummoxJR's BMP2SPR.EXE program (available from Norn Underground to put the individual bitmaps back into a sprite file (.SPR). And when it's all done, I edit the body data files (.ATT) with WordPad.
A: One of the things I discovered about the way Creatures works, as regards the sprites. If a sprite set is missing for a norn type, it just defaults to the previous variety of norn that is present. The game comes with three types: Banana Norns (0), Fox Norns (1), and Horse Norns (2). If you don't have the Santa Norn (3) sprites, it will default to the Horse Norn. Likewise, if you have the Purple Mountain Norns (4), but not the Forest Norns (5), the Ron Norns (6) or the Santa 97/Bunny Norns (7), Bunny will look like a Purple Mountain Norn.
Another interesting feature is that Creatures also defaults downward as regards age. That is why the Santa 97 Norn, although it looks like an adult, is actually using baby sprites. If Creatures cannot find the child stage sprites for a type of norn, it will drop back and use the baby stage sprites. And that is why your newborn Santa 97 Norns look so strange. The baby stage sprites are actually adult sized already. And it just stays there for the life of the norn (at least until I get around to doing the sprites for the other stages of life!)
Greg Poehlein
poehlein@sigecom.net