Nova's Basic Introduction To Hexing

This was created by Nova@Supernova and is being uploaded for preservation purposes. Hopefully someone finds it useful ;)

Hexing is fun but takes some time to learn. In this post, I am simply trying to explain what exactly you do when you hex. This is for the complete beginner and isn't going to tell you how to change something exactly, but explain briefly what hexing is.

How petz are built up

Petz are built up from ballz. There are 66 "standard" balls (in a section called Ballz Info) that all files have and then "addballz" to add extra balls if they are needed. Examples of addballs are the maine coon's chest tuft and parts of the great dane's big muzzle.

Between these ballz are linez to connect them.

You can also have spots on ballz called paintballz.

Through hexing you can change f.ex. the size, fuzz, colour and texture of these ballz.

Scales

Each breedfile has a set of scales called Default pet Scale and Default ball scale. The first is how large the pet will be, the other how large the ballz will be. A pet with small pet scales and large ball scales will look small and fat. A pet with large pet scale and small ball scale will look tall and skinny.

In most files they are set to be the same number because if they are very different they will not breed true.

Extensions & Enlargments

These work a bit like scales, but instead make things longer/shorter. There is f.ex. Leg extension and body extension. There are limits here, like with scales, in what will breed true and what won't.

For instance, says a file has Leg Extension 17/20 (first being the frontlegs, 2nd hind legs). If I change it to 7 and 10, the breed will have much shorter legs.

Move

Move is a section where you can change the position of the standard balls. This is what hexers use to change the shape of a file (beyond extensions and enlargments)

Hexing

Ballz, linez, paintballz, scales, extensions, enlargment and move.

Those aren't the only things you can change by hexing, but they are perhaps the main ones.

What these balls look like depends on numbers. It is changing these numbers that is hexing. Different numbers are programmed to stand for different things. So by editing the numbers, you can edit how the file looks. You can create pretty much anything. The limits are mainly what the game can handle in terms of what is possible to make breed true (the game has some limits programmed) or how strange the file might look when it is moving (we cannot change how the balls are programmed to move).