hi there! i'm a Mii dataminer/expert, and i'm fully documenting every single officially recognized Mii on a website called the Mii Library. of course, this also includes the Mii NPCs in Nintendogs+Cats! (when i say "document", by the way, i don't just mean recreating the Mii. i extract Miis from game files to get a 100% accurate Mii!)
while digging around through the files, i noticed several small things that i thought would be interesting to share! since i'm not very knowledgeable about the rest of the game (i'm really only playing it for the Miis haha) i don't think i should be the one to add this information to the wiki, should it be important enough to be added, but i'm listing it here for anyone else to do so, or just because it's kinda interesting :)
so, Nintendogs+Cats has 129 Miis in its files. 100 of those Miis are the Wii CPU Miis, which mainly appear in games like Wii Sports Resort and Wii Party. you know, like Matt (Wii) and all them. the other 29 are completely unique to this game, and will be the ones i'm focusing on in this post.
below is a screenshot of the files. of note are two things. the first thing is that the NPCs are stored in a file format named ".bspec". this format seems to be unique to Nintendogs+Cats, as it contains everything about the NPC and their pet, including all the tricks they've learned etc. unfortunately, i don't know anything about this file, and the only thing i can read from it myself are the names of the tricks the pet has learned, the pet's name. and of course, the Mii data for my Mii documentation.
the second thing you may have noticed is that there's a gap in the numbers! the filenames start from NPC00, NPC01, NPC02, etc. all the way up until NPC12, where it then suddenly jumps to NPC20 and ends with NPC35! this leaves 7 NPCs completely unaccounted for! i want to look in the game's text files to see if maybe these 7 NPCs had names leftover from an earlier point in development, but this game's text files are, no joke, the messiest organization i have literally ever seen in a video game. so that will be a while if i get around to doing that. sorry!
next, since each of these files contain every NPC, my very first thought was, "does this mean Ted Rumsworth has a pet we don't know about?". i don't know much about these games, but from what i do know, Ted does not have a pet in-game. well, it seems for both Ted and Ellie (not familiar with who Ellie is, sorry) do have pet data! although it's a bit different from the others, as i'll explain later. however, every other NPC in the game does have full pet information, so if it was previously thought that there were NPCs aside from just Ted and Ellie in Nintendogs+Cats that didn't have any pets, let me know and i'll see if i can mod the game to load the pet! Ted's pet is named Cleo and Ellie's pet (more on Ellie later! it's important!) is named Precious.
another thing i found is something very interesting to me, but probably only slightly interesting to everyone here, so if you don't want to read the "how" and just want my conclusion, you can skip this paragraph and just read the bold text at the end. but, it's that i firmly believe NPC20 to NPC35 are either Miis that were randomly generated and then saved (basically the equivalent of doing the "choose a look-alike" feature and then just saving the Mii without making any changes), or at some point were randomly generated to start with, but were then edited a bit after. normally i'm able to tell randomly generated Miis from a glance, but these Miis do look a little unique, so i'm thinking it's the latter... but either way, they definitely started as randomly generated. in the Mii name field, there's some leftover name data - most prominently visible with Miis who have shorter names. the best example is Joe. Joe's name data isn't simply just "Joe", it's actually "Joe❌ii16", with the ❌ meant to represent a "stop reading" character to let the game know the name ends there. so anywhere in-game and on the system, the name reads as just "Joe", but his Mii data file hides the extra "ii16" at the end. other NPCs in this group are similar, but Joe is the best example. Nintendo has some internal tools to randomly batch generate a set number of Miis. all the Miis generated using this tool will have the name "MiiXXX", with "XXX" being a sequential number. in the case of Nintendogs+Cats, it seems 3 extra characters were added as a prefix - perhaps they were all named DogMiiXXX, CpuMiiXXX, etc., but we can't know for sure. either way, this leftover name data heavily suggests this tool was used to initially create these 16 Miis. while some names, like Conner, are too long to show any of this leftover name data, the position of those Miis in the files makes it more than possible that the leftover name data was there, but was simply overwritten due to the long NPC name. TL;DR: 16 of the NPCs in Nintendogs+Cats were initially created using a random Mii generator. whether or not they were then adjusted manually after that is hard to tell
here's something cool: the names of the tricks all these pets know! ...okay, it's not actually that cool, they're all set to be the same placeholder names. aside from Ted Rumsworth and Ellie, who for some reason, have this data blanked out, every other NPC's pets know 20 tricks, all named "trick0", "trick1", "trick2", "trick3"... you get the idea, continuing all the way up to "trick19". not very descriptive names, Archie!
...i should've finished all this looking-intos before writing this post. okay, okay, remember what i said about Ellie? well, actually, apparently... there are two Ellie NPCs! one has full pet data, and the other has some stuff like tricks blanked out, as mentioned earlier. their Mii data files are completely identical. so, yeah. the Ellie with the pet data is NPC05, and the Ellie with some of the pet data blanked out is NPC12. sorry about that! (and i've written so much, i don't want to go back and rewrite everything...)
oh yeah, i should list all the names of the NPCs (and their pets) that correspond to the filenames, so you can see which ones were randomly generated as mentioned above.
NPC00 to NPC12
Jamie (Bella), Diane (Milo), Roberto (Moxy), Cody (Dudley), Drew (Luna), Ellie (Sam), Celia (Truffles), Archie (Spot), Raymond (Dottie), Jessica (Tucker), Sally (Sadie), Ted (Cleo), Ellie (Precious)
NPC20 to NPC35
Ally (Benny), Marie (Lily), Conner (Rex), Richard (Sasha), Kate (Buddy), Rosa (Zoe), Kenji (Lucky), Noah (Pepper), Carmen (Max), Grace (Stella), Zach (Cooper), Jacob (Rebel), Tonya (Rocco), Mina (Chibi), Vinny (Gus), Joe (Loulou)
CREATOR NAMES!! i can't believe it, but most NPCs in Nintendogs+Cats have Mii creator names! this is not something that is common among official Miis, especially Miis inside game data. okay, so, basically every NPC has the creator name "カゲ", which translates to "Kage". there are two exceptions to this: Tonya, who has a completely blank creator name :(, and Ted Rumsworth, who's creator name is set to "ヤマウチ", which translates to "Yamauchi". any staff on the Nintendogs+Cats team who have the last names "Kage" and "Yamauchi"? if so, those are the people who made the NPC Miis in Nintendogs+Cats!
closing thoughts: i'm sure there's more obscure data in these Mii data files that i'd be happy to share, but until they get added to the Mii Library, this is about it haha. i hope this has contributed in some way! if you want me to mod the game to load one NPC + pet data over a different one, let me know, and it should be as simple as swapping the file names :) this is in case you want pictures of some pets you can't normally see, so i can place them over an NPC/pet you can normally get a good look at!
thanks for reading! oh... and one final thing. i'm looking for anyone - and i mean anyone who could potentially still have even just one Mii from the US/JP SpotPass data. there were a lot of Miis distributed to this game via SpotPass, but i have yet to find anyone who could potentially have this data for me to back up and preserve online. if you happen to have that, please message me ASAP so we can get this information preserved online forever!!! thank you!
