Post by ℓacey ☀️ on Jul 23, 2021 8:48:10 GMT -5
in this lesson, i am going to teach you all about add balls! let's scroll down to the [Add Ball] section in betsy's file. this is what it looks like:
as you can see, i added a few labels to this section for the screenshot to help better illustrate how it works. add balls are named very appropriately, because they make it possible for us to add new balls to a baby's body. this is great because it allows us to create brand new hairstyles and features for our babyz!
every add ball is connected to one of the baby's main body balls. like the body balls, every add ball is also numbered. if you recall from the ball list, the last body ball is number 119. you can see above that i've labeled the starting ball beneath the [Add Ball] header with ;120, because that ball is number 120-- essentially, this section picks up where the main body ball list left off.
the part you'll be most concerned with while hexing is the next part, where i've labeled "hair begins here". as you can probably guess, this is where the addballs for betsy's pigtails live! you can tell what part of the body a ball is connected to by looking at the first number in the line. these hair balls all start with number 63, which is the baby's head ball. that's how you know it's her hair!
let's take a closer look at betsy's pigtails for a moment.
remember how i said every baby is made of balls? well, their hair is made of balls too! in the image above i've used bright colored dots to show you how the balls work together to form the pigtail shape. now let's look at betsy's add ball list again.
the four balls i highlighted are the very same balls shown in the pigtail picture. i highlighted each ball with the corresponding color so you could see which ball is which. the top ball i highlighted in pink is her bobble/hair tie.
now i'm going to briefly go through the different numbers in the ball code and what they do. let's look at the ball i've highlighted in dark blue.
this is the top ball of betsy's pigtail and i've highlighted each part of the line that is important when hexing with addballs.
pink: the body part that this add ball is connected to, in this case the baby's head ball (63)
light blue: the position of the addball on the baby's head using XYZ coordinates. in simpler terms, making these three numbers larger or smaller will move the ball in different directions on the baby's head. our X coordinate ("90" here) moves the ball from left to right. the Y coordinate ("-80" here) moves the ball up and down. finally the Z coordinate ("5" here) moves the ball forward and backward (like in front of or behind the baby).
yellow: ball color and outline color of the ball
dark blue: fuzziness of the ball
orange: outline thickness
purple: ball size
green: texture the ball uses. this refers back to my lesson about the texture list; remember when i said the baby's hair texture is texture #3 by default? you can see that here betsy's pigtails use that hair texture for the ball's color. if there is a texture used here, the ball color will not show. if you'd rather have a solid color from the chart here (such as betsy's bobble/hair tie i mentioned above), you would use -1 here in place of the texture number.
that's really all there is to addballs! i know this can be very confusing/overwhelming at first, so let's try to move one of betsy's addballs together so you can see how it works more visually.
so let's take that addball we were just looking at and change the first number in that XYZ section (highlighted light blue above) from 90 to 150, so that it looks like this:
now save betsy's file and open the game to see what has happened!
betsy looks pretty astonished about the fact that you've made the top of her pigtail float out into space!
so the number we changed is the X axis, which controls that ball's position on the baby from left to right. we changed it from 90 to 150, which moved it over to the right of its original position. if you were to change the number to be smaller instead of larger, it would move to the left instead.
"0" is the number for the center of a baby's head, so anything larger than 0 will be on the right side of the baby and anything smaller than 0 (as in negative numbers) will be on the left.
so now let's put the X axis back to 90 where it was and move on to the next number, the Y axis. change that number from -80 to -140, like so:
since we are manipulating the Y axis this time, instead of moving out to the side, the ball should move upwards!
betsy is like "seriously what are you doing to me" lmao
lastly, you guessed it, we're going to play with the Z-axis. set the Y number back to -80 where it was and then change the one next to it from "5" to "-55", like so:
this positional change is harder to see from the baby's front, but if you turn her to the side:
you can see that the ball has moved forwards, out in front of the baby!
the last thing i'm going to have you do is create two new addballs on betsy's head. so let's change that Z number back to "5" like it was before. then, go ahead and highlight the entire line we were just working on and paste it at the end of her addballs. it should look something like this when you have done that:
as you can see i've added a separation in between the first section and our new addball, as well as a ;148 label to remind myself this is ball #148.
now to test your addball knowledge, i'm going to have you do three things.
first: let's move the addball high above the baby's head so we can see it.
second: let's change the texture of this ball! pick any bmp and add it to the texture list, then change the texture number.
third: make the ball bigger!
using my anatomy of the addball information above, you should be able to complete these three things. once you are done, open the game and see what she looks like! if you've done it right, betsy should look something like this:
hooray, you successfully added a new addball!!
for your final test (and to make things easier for the next lesson), copy/paste the new addball you just made onto another line, creating a second new addball, and change the X-axis number on that one to a negative instead of a positive.
if your baby now has two weird floating addballs like this:
that means you've mastered addballs and are ready to move on to our next lesson: linez!
reply below to show me your betsy with her two floating addballs, making sure that you've done each of the three things i challenged you with.