Roaming minor pets

Roaming Minor Pets brings the wild critters of The Sims 3 Pets to life. Rodents, lizards, snakes, turtles and birds no longer sit forever on the spot where they spawned: they wander the neighborhood on their own.

What they do
 - Walk for real, with proper walk cycles, and no teleporting or fade-outs. Rodents scurry, turtles plod and lizards dart. Snakes slither with a custom undulating animation.
 - Birds, small and large, take off, fly in a straight line and land somewhere else.
 - Stay outdoors: they never wander into houses, even through open doors.
 - Alternate short rests (up to 10 sim-minutes) with 10–20 m walks. While resting, reptiles and rodents often circle in place.
 - Respect game speed: walks and flights pause with the game and speed up at speed 2 and 3.

Catching them
Your Sim can only catch a critter once it stands still. If it's on the move, the Sim follows it and starts the normal capture when it stops within reach. Birds keep their normal befriend interaction, and recapturing escaped pets works as usual.

Performance
Only critters near the camera are animated frame by frame. Distant ones move in cheap steps every two seconds and get their animation as soon as the camera comes close. The number of critters walking at the same time is capped.

Safe to add and remove
The mod only moves critters the game spawns. It saves just its own settings, and the game ignores them if you remove the mod.

Installation
Put both files in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Mods\Packages\:
 - TS3RoamingMinorPets.package (script)
 - TS3RoamingMinorPets_Anim.package (animations)

Requires Pets. Script mods must be enabled (standard Resource.cfg setup).

Conflicts
The animation package replaces EA's behavior state machines for lizards, rodents, snakes and turtles, to make them circle more often while resting. Any other mod that overrides those same resources will conflict.

Debug
Type roamingpetsdebug on in the cheat console to unlock the "DEBUG: Roaming Minor Pets" menus. They cover settings, statistics, spawning a critter and moving a pet now.