State of Affairs news - JPOG HD with Some New Animals mod for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis

I’ve reached the species cap already, which means I’ll have to implement a kind of modular system for selecting which dinosaurs you’d like. This should be as simple as editing dinolist.txt and fossilhunt.txt but since each dinosaur needs it’s own skin I can imagine I’d have to make some pretty beefy tml files, which so far have been a pain in my area. As far as sourcing/making skins is concerned, I’m not too sure what I should do. I was thinking about editing some of the DJE mod skins as they’re super high quality.

I’m not sure which species I’ll end up including in the first release or how I’ll implement them. Some of the hard-coded AI is really getting on my nerves - Sarcosuchus, for example, is based on Ankylosaurus and even though it’s Tclass is Spino and it’s stats are hugely aggressive, it still flees from everything. Carnivores-turned-herbivores like Gigantoraptor and Deinocheirus seem fine but I’m not sure they can eat plants. I’ll have to keep experimenting. The mod will probably release with Dryosaurus replacing the goat, but I’d like to edit the carn feeder so that it can dispense all the reasonably sized dinosaurs so that carnivores can have more varied prey. I think there’s a hard cap on how many animals a feeder can dispense, which is a shame. I’m also not sure if it’d be possible to grab the auto-hatcheries from that mission. I’m completely new to modding JPOG so I’d like to discover for myself the game’s limits.

Though I have some knowledge of computer science, I don’t expect to crack how to edit tmls quickly any time soon. Hex makes me want to cry, but I reckon I’ll figure it out st some point.

I’m well on the way to completing reworks of all 25 vanilla dinos, as well as the visitors and other models that require it. Most of the dinosaurs are actually quite accurate - Diliphosaurus and Allosaurus are hideously scaled, but I imagine some people probably like the tiny dilopho. I think the Jurassic franchise’s interpretation of Dilophosaurus constitutes an injustice towards the terror of the early Jurassic. The strange, chubby Ceratosaurus was also something I had a problem with. I was going to be cheeky and replace Cerato with a model based on Allosaurus, but I think variety trumps accuracy in this case. Carnotaurus, being a ceratosaur itself, was nearly a cerato clone but I decided that the ungainly animations of Ceratosaurus didn’t suit such a lean predator.

I’ve seen people requesting a lot of generic large carnivores like Yangchuamosaurus and Tyrannotitan, and though these super-predators are interesting in their own way, they won’t be a focus of this mod as I personally would like to present dinosaurs in a more representative way. Most dinosaurs weren’t huge but were instead quite small, and I think there’s a variety that would be lost if I put in too many allosaurids and charcharodontosaurids.

I hope this post has done more to inform you of what I hope to achieve with this mod.