Local Species

Have you ever wanted to use your own custom art of an avatar, or even have a sprite modeled after your character? Local Species are a special feature that lets you put your own avatars (also sometimes known as walkabouts or game sprites) into your own Dream, independently of the ones Furcadia offers on Digo Market. Keep in mind this is for custom artwork that you provide, or it can be downloaded from free to use resources.

Looking to use a favorite Digo off of Digo Market in your own Dream for free? Check out the Mimic DS Tutorial for more on that! A local species can be anything you can think of and adds an extra layer of customization to your Dream.

To get started with adding local species made with custom artwork, make sure you've read over (or are at least familiar with) the Fox Editor Tutorial first. The most important part to making sure your avatars work properly is making sure your settings for an avatar are set correctly in FoxEd.

Table of Contents

Importing avatars from legacy files

If you are importing avatars, there are specific steps to follow to make sure everything works right. You can watch a video on how to convert your legacy avatars to 32bit, or you can go through this checklist:

File > Import > Objects

In the drop down menu

Import from: > legacy Fox File > Import as: > 1 > Gendered Avatar Object(s)

In the popup window, you can check through all the aspects that apply to your avatar for import.

  • Small art is for the normal size avatars of Furcadia.
  • Large art is for art that is double sized. It's unlikely you will use this if you're importing a legacy file, so you can leave it blank.
  • Click the three dots ... to find your file location, then type in the shape numbers you would like to import from the old file.
    • If you want to import them all, then just type the word all in the box.
  • You can select whether you want to either add to your current file, or replace what you have already in the file.

You can determine if you want the pieces to start at the beginning, end, or before/after an object in your file. Usually for avatar patches you'll only want one object in your .fox file.

Click import to finish, and everything should appear in the location you specified.

Creating a new avatar from scratch

If you are starting from a fresh, brand new file where you will be creating the art yourself, this is how to set up your file:

Edit > Convert all objects to > Gendered Avatar

Click Yes and then your file will be avatar ready! Usually for avatar patches you'll only want one object in your .fox file.

Note: If you only want to have one gender to represent your avatar, you can use the regular avatar object type, instead of the gendered avatar.

Notice that you now have more tabs along the top of your avatar object. Here they are in a list format:

  • Male Small
  • Male Large
  • Female Small
  • Female Large
  • Unspec Small
  • Unspec Large
    • All of the small art is for the avatars in the different genders, and they correspond to the small size format of Furcadia. Large size is exactly double of small. You can use the Resize Tool in the Edit Menu of FoxEd to auto-generate a large size avatar.
  • Portraits
    • Once you click the tab for Portraits, you'll see that there is a dropdown with the different genders available to add portraits for all 3 genders.
  • Specitags
    • Specitags are the icons to the left of when people talk, and each gender again will appear in the dropdown.
  • Butlers
  • Icons
    • Icons and butlers are used in various places in the game, such as in FurEd and in whisper windows. They have different size versions available in the dropdown as well.
  • Properties

This where you can name your avatar and select the license for your art, as well as choose whether it can swim and fly, etc.!

Now that we have our avatar file set up, it's time for the fun part: creating all the art! You may find this video tutorial about making any art be 32bit remappable helpful for this, too!

Adding the avatar to a Dream patch

Once your art is ready to be used in a Dream, it has to be formatted as a patch. Patch files need to be named a certain way for it to be detected by DS.

So, local species in particular have to be named local#.fox with the # being replaced with whatever number slot you're going to use. There should be only one fox file per avatar object. Modern Dreams have 22 local slots for free to be used, which means you can name each avatar file local1.fox all the way to local22.fox for free! You can get even more local species slots if you get a Group Package or a Sponsorship.

The word local must be lowercase and the number you choose will be the number used in the DS file. So, for now we are going to name our file local1.

Incorporating the avatar into the DS

There are as many ways to make someone turn into your avatar as you can imagine! For instance, you could opt to have the avatar be a prize at the end of a game, or earned as part of a quest. Or, you could even have people turn into it the moment they arrive, or have it activate by using a command or a DS button!

If you're not familiar with DragonSpeak, you can read the Beginner DragonSpeak tutorial and the How to use the DS Editor tutorial to get more info about that.

For this tutorial we will use a command to turn yourself into the avatar. The DS trigger we need for this looks like:

(0:31) When someone says {…},
     (5:1200) change the triggering player to localspecies #.

In the first cause DS line, we can put the command in the brackets, such as {penguin} or {epicwolf}. Whatever command you decide on for your avatar, put it directly into the curly brackets {}.

The DS effect is what is going to happen when someone types out the command. In this case it will turn the player that uses it into the local avatar (or local species) of whatever slot we choose. We’ve already set up our local avatar and named it local1 previously, so we are going to change the pound sign # to the number >1 so it uses the first local species slot. All together our trigger should now look something like this:

(0:31) When someone says {avatar},
     (5:1200) change the triggering player to localspecies 1.

Congratulations! Your new local avatar is now available to use! But wait.. What if we want to change back? Looks like we need just a little bit more. This last trigger shows us how to do that:

(0:31) When someone says {…},
     (5:1202) change the triggering player back to their original species.

Again, you can pick whatever command you want to change yourself back. Then the second DS effect line does the rest of the work. It changes the player back to whatever it was they were originally so we don’t have to worry about picking the right avatar for them. With that in mind our trigger should look similar to this:

(0:31) When someone says {normal},
     (5:1202) change the triggering player back to their original species.

And that's all there is to it! Here's the full set of triggers we used below. Have fun with your new locals and Happy Dreaming!

(0:31) When someone says {avatar},
     (5:1200) change the triggering player to localspecies 1.

(0:31) When someone says {normal},
     (5:1202) change the triggering player back to their original species.

DragonSpeak Lines

Additional Conditions

  (1:1200) and they are localspecies #,
  (1:1201) and they are not localspecies #,

Effects

  (5:1200) change the triggering player to localspecies #.
  (5:1201) change any player present to localspecies #.
  (5:1202) change the triggering player back to their original species.
  (5:1203) change any player present back to their original species.
  (5:1205) make localspecies # mimic the avatar #.
  (5:1206) make localspecies # mimic the avatar #, with gender #.
  (5:1207) disable mimicry on localspecies #.

File Specifications

Local Species use 20 frames for the avatar, including walking, sitting, and laying down in SW, SE, NW and NE directions. Any art that isn't filled in any of the given tabs (Small, Large, Portraits, etc.) will be substituted with the unspecified default canine art.

That's it for this tutorial! Since you now know how to use local species to your advantage, maybe now you might be ready to try making even more things come to life in your Dream (making your Dream more interactive) -- you can start the Beginning DragonSpeak tutorial if so!


If you have any further questions about dreamweaving, feel free to contact the Beekins (who are live volunteers) in game by saying help I need help with my dream!

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