My goal is to make my own version of each pet breed which will replace the game's version of the breeds. I don't have a lot of experience with modding though and there's not much information about how to do this, so any help or suggestions in general would be very welcome

So far, I know that the pet breed templates should be the PETB files, which I've found in S3PE - they're in one of the Pets EP full build packages. I exported the Abyssinian PETB as a file and opened it in Notepad, but that's as far as I've been able to get due to my extremely limited knowledge of how the files should work. From what I can see there's a lot of different values; the only ones I'm sure of are name, gender, species and age. I think the others are markings and colors; I would think there's some parts about the sliders in here too but I haven't located them yet.

For now I'll just be working on trying to decipher the different values before making any changes. I'll post updates about my progress as I go in case anyone's interested. Also, the file I'm currently looking at is FullBuild0_p10 under C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\The Sims 3\EP5\GameData\Shared\Packages if anyone wants to take a look at the PETB resources.

9/28/15 - This is going well so far! I still haven't attempted making any changes, but I've found the markings, base pelt colors, and what seems to be body types. It looks like the templates should actually be fairly easy to edit, if putting the edited version back in the game goes smoothly. I'm going to keep poking around in the code for a bit, but I'll try making some minor modifications soon just to see if it works.

9/29/15 - Had some trouble figuring out the colors but I've worked it out now; they seem to be in HSV format. At this point I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to edit and add markings through the XML as well as change marking and base colors. The main issue I'm having now is the sliders. The only way I can see to edit the body/head/etc. shape is to select the game's shape presets, which isn't exactly ideal, and then that rules out the use of custom sliders. Since my goal is for other people to be able to use these eventually, I don't want a ton of sliders, but there are some that make a huge difference like the pet height and tail thickness ones. For now though I just want to see if this will actually work, so I'm going to make a few edits and try to import the resource back into the game.

9/29/15 - I tried to change the color of a marking, but the changes didn't show up at all in-game. Editing the files doesn't seem to be harming anything which is good, but it's also not working. I'll continue to experiment with this but it's looking pretty challenging at the moment.

9/30/15 - There's a lot of resource keys listed in the PETB file, and since there's some things I'm not seeing in there at all (sliders), I'm working on figuring out what those keys are. It takes forever to find anything in the full build file because there's a huge number of resources, but I've found several .DDS images. They include horse tail types, some pet accessories (a saddle and a collar, though I'm sure there's more) and a ton of pet-related objects (like horse hitching posts). The horse tail type is very promising - accessories aren't so necessary for breeds, but the body/fur types are, so hopefully it'll be possible to edit the breeds using these files.

9/30/15 - There are also a lot of XML files for markings, tail/mane types and horse hoof feathering. These seem to be what's used in the PETB files, at least more often than the .DDS files. Several of the XML files I've found have matched those mentioned in the PETB file, and the formats are very similar.

10/3/15 - Alright, so at this point I've gone over the entire PETB file and the only things I've found are for markings, along with a little over 1 line of symbols at the end of the file. The codes for the markings make sense and they're consistent, so it seems like it should be fairly easy to add markings to a breed or edit existing ones. The problem is the body and fur shapes. Unless that's represented somehow by the symbols at the end of the file, I don't see any place in the entire PETB file that references sliders or shape presets. After some experiments with the search tool in S3PE, I've found files for fur and body presets, but their file names and TGI info aren't anywhere in the Abyssinian PETB file. The info on which values are used by each breed has to exist somewhere, but I haven't managed to find it yet. I'm going to try and see if I can figure out what those symbols mean in case that's something useful or important and look at some other PETB files, since most of what I've learned so far is based just on the abyssinian one and there could be useful information in the dog or horse files - or even other cat files.

Any and all suggestions related to this project are absolutely welcome - even if you don't have any experience modding! Just pure speculation may end up being helpful somehow.

10/4/15 - I exported the PETB files for the Maine Coon, Standard Schnauzer, Alaskan Malamute and Gypsy Vanner breeds to compare them to the Abyssinian file. All five files are formatted in the same way, with only markings, up until the very end of the files. At the end of each file is a few lines of symbols, which are different for each file. The symbols for the dog and cat files are fairly similar, but the horse ones are very different. It seems like these symbols (possibly unicode?) represent the fur types and slider values, but I haven't figured out how to read them yet, and even if I do it would likely be very hard to use them to edit the file.

This is the code I can't understand. Anyone have any ideas?

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