Okay, this is an attempt to explain about the discus thing. It's as comprehensive and accurate as my understanding of the subject, so take that with a shaker of salt. :-)
I'm not going to try to do this in any systematic way, really, because I'm
not hardwired like that. Instead, here are some representative discus strains
which will hopefully give you some idea of the basic possibilities in pattern,
and a definition of the terms I'm using. All the spadework on the subject was
done by other people, notably in my mind Don and Frank.
Here goes.
There are four base colors. These are the metallic colors that a discus will be, whether you can see the bases or not. They are blue, gold, green, and silver. Let's look at them for a moment.
The gold and the silver have stripes, just to give you an idea of what that's like. The blue and the green do not. The gold has just an eye stripe, and the silver has heavy stripes.
Here's where it gets complicated. The base colors are always there, no matter what the fish actually looks like. The base color (and the eye color, but I'm not even getting into that, because it's horribly complicated and I only dimly get it myself) are determined by the second to last set of variables in FisherMan's "Splicing" frame. Let's look at that for a moment, shall we?
Okay, the numbers in each window are there so we can refer to the windows themselves without getting even more confused than we are. So when I say that the base color is determined by the variables, I'm referring to the windows marked as 7a and 7b. Just for the record, I always make the whole set of windows match. Set 1 is always the same value in both panes (a and b), 2 is always the same value, etc. So when I give you a number, enter it in both a and b for whatever set. Otherwise, we have to do math. And nobody wants to do that. With Frank's original DiscusBase, you started with a tank of eight fish, which would give you each of the base colors, but with two variations on eye color. All of his fish had "0" set as the 8 values, but I found pretty quickly that it was best to just completely leave those windows unchecked and blank if I wanted any sort of predictable results. So you can start with any of the tanks I give you here, but just pretend that the 8 set is not even there.
The seven set determines base color (and eye color, which we're ignoring. I'm using exclusively the variables which give you fishes that don't always have red eyes. There's another set of numbers that will give you red eyes on every fish, but that's boring.) and the values that Frank used in those windows were "9" for blue bases, "10" for gold, "11" for green, and "0" for silver.
Got it? That should give you at least some idea where to start to get the colors you want. Checking the "gene" window on the tanks I give you here might help you determine other patterns.
In general, 1a and 1b determine if you have a solid body color, like this:
Body colors can be white or grey or black, pinks, reds, yellows, oranges, and browns. (The interesting thing about this is, the yellow fish on the left up there has a blue base, and the one on the right has a silver base. But once you put the body color over them, they look the same, all other variables being the same.) To get a solid body color, you need a low number in 1a and 1b, Frank used "10", so so will we.
If you use a medium number, let's use "50", in the 1a and 1b, you get halo patterns that show the base color under the body color, around the fins. Like this:
I'm mostly using the reddish body colors and the gold base for demonstration purposes because someone asked about them. But as you can see from the pinks and greens, the halo can be a combination of any of the four base colors and any of the body colors, and the ratio between the two can vary, too. Also, they can have bars or not in whatever configuration.
If you put a "90" in the 1a and 1b windows, you're going to end up with a lace pattern, *most* of the time. That's about to get even more complicated, so let's go slowly here. The lace patterns look like this:
The first picture there is a blue base with a light lace in a dark red body color, and it's got stripes, too, just for fun. The middle pic is a green base with a similarly light lace pattern in another dark red body color. The last one is a silver base with a heavy lace pattern in an orangey body color. So laces can be any combination of base color and body color, too, and can be heavy or light, and can have stripes that are also heavy or light. Now, just to thoroughly confuse us, one of the things that you can get in the lace patterns is a variation that's essentially "solid lace". In other worse, the ratio of base color to body color is so high that you can't even see the body color, and what you get, then, is a solid base color, like those way up there at the top. You get those by entering "90" in 2a and 2b when "90" is already in 1a and 1b. Technically, this is a lace pattern:
It's just that you can't see the body color at all. If you could see it, it would probably be white, based on the gene code, which is 90-90-10-10-10-10-11-0. You can make one like him by plugging those values into the splicing window. If you want to see what I mean about it being white, you have to do this: take the fish out of the tank, and open the splicing frame on the fish file. Change just the first set of values to "10" instead of "90", and dump them back into the tank. Presto, they're white! (The reason you can't just do this to the tank file is that these have eggs, and Fisherman gets a little weird once they have eggs. You can't splice the genes of the eggs at all. And you get more reliable results if you splice a fish file than a tank file with fish in it. Don't ask me why, I only know what I've seen.)
As for what all the rest of the numbers do, you'll have to play around with them. I am sorely lacking in pattern recognition skills, and honestly, this is as close as I get to identifying cause and effect after three years or so of playing around. If this all seems way too complicated for you, you can just wait, and I'll be putting them up on my page for Fish of the Week, and also I put them in tanks sometimes, so you can get them then. If this seems only *partly* too complicated for you, then you can ask me some questions and I'll try to clarify. But no promises. I barely understand all this myself. :-)
Hopefully this at least defines the terms I keep using, and gives you some broad ideas about what to try yourself, or at least what kinds of questions to ask.
In the meantime, you can download the strains I used in the pictures here, in no particular order.
Harpy hdsidhe@gmail.com Handmaiden
of the Goddess of Irony
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