What is green spew?

Green spew is something I first stumbled across when I was creating the Sabertooth Norns. Similar to the problem known as Rainbow Spew, it is an undesired "glitch" in which some or all of a Norn's body parts appear covered in green pixels when viewed in the game.

Although uncommon, it has posed problems for some creators in the past; the Sabertooth Norns, Yautja Norns, Deep Norns, Gaius, and the updated C2toDS Pixie Norns have all suffered green spew at some point during their development.

This is a trickier problem to combat than Rainbow Spew, as it is not caused by the same file formatting issue that causes Rainbow Spew. It afflicts both Windows and Mac users equally, and methods used to remove Rainbow Spew (eg. converting them to 565 format using Sprite Editor) are not always a reliable cure for green spew.

The best way to avoid green spew is to be proactive. Start with copies of pre-existing breed sprite files (eg. those for the ChiChis) and paste over the frames with your own sprites. A Norn's body parts are much more likely to develop green spew if the sprite files are created by pasting the sprites into a brand new file.

To date, the most reliable method I have found for fixing afflicted sprites is to move them to the Creatures 3/Images or Docking Station/Images folder. Open SpriteBuilder (in Administrator Mode if you use Windows Vista) and load a sprite file for an official breed, eg. the ChiChi or Bruin Norns. Hit Save. Then load the spew-afflicted sprite file and hit Save again; the "good" attributes of the official Norn breed's sprite file should be applied to the spew-afflicted sprite file, "curing" it of the green spew.

Location does appear to be important; the same method shows less reliability when the afflicted files are located somewhere else, say in the My Documents folder.