The Pictogram Builders have MOVED! Please find the downloads and a guide on how to use them HERE.

Going to try to re-organize this...

This post has two purposes.
One: I returned to the Forest after a long absence, and did not realize that I had missed an update. Due to this, I was not viewing pictograms correctly, and the new friends that I made could not be identified. When I realized this mistake, I began working on a way to convert a false 1st gen picto into its true 2nd gen form, so that I (and maybe others who made the same mistake) could recognize people they'd been playing with after the patch had been properly installed. I don't know if this will be of any use to anyone but myself, but I figure there's bound to be at least one other person at some point in time who has or will return after a period of absence and not realise there was a patch update for the second gen pictos.

Two: This is the one you will probably be most interested in. This is a way to find ANY deer's player/login WITHOUT using the map or resorting to a "Who is this?" post. All you need is a screenshot (or your memory) and the files I've uploaded.

Investigations and conspiracy theories after the cut~

Firstly, a link to the 'True Name' post - Link!
Pretty nifty.



Ravus made the offhand comment "Although it's kinda cool in a way, you get to know other people's deers' secret names. xD" -- which got me thinking. If the two generations work the same, I can take any picto I can re-create with the 'secret names' and convert it to a second generation, and then I would be able to recognize deer I meet again when I re-enter the forest.
So, using some screenshots, I attempted to convert a false 1st gen to a 2nd gen for someone I knew both pictograms for - Karuna.

(I would embed it, since it's not large, but I can't figure out the script! Feel free to tell me how to fix it) Apparently I just had it typed in wrong. D'oh. Thanks, Shaku, for getting me to try ONE MORE TIME
Karuna is the real deer pelt with poppies.
After some trial and error, I determined that this was the pictogram that I was seeing Karuna use. I moved it over to the 2nd gen link and got this. Karuna's actual pictogram can be found here.
You'll notice that the pictogram I converted and the actual pictogram are one character different - the fourth. Why? No idea, because when I convert Karuna's actual 2nd gen to the 1st gen link, it's not what I was seeing. I figured there might be a pattern, so I decided to start translating several pictograms to determine what the pattern might be.
I started to compile a PDF file of every single character possible in both generations. (If anyone is interested in these I might upload them)

When I started to attempt a translation of Vodun's pictogram, however, I noticed something -- I couldn't find all of the pieces I needed. So I tried something crazy and put in some numbers in random slots.
It turns out there are not 15 possible characters for each of the four places. There are 24. In the first, second, and third slots, the numbers 1-9 are also available. I haven't figured out what's missing in the fourth slot, if anything. If you read the comments section of Unplugged's post, you'll notice that no one links their deer with a 'true name' with a number in one of the first three slots, except for Emerald -- and I can't verify that the picto linked to is actually someone's picto.
However, that may not mean that those numbers in slots 1-3 aren't being used; it might explain why I got a 'bad translation' on Karuna's pictogram. Although not entirely incorrect, this turns out not to be entirely true, either. The numbers 1-9 correspond with the first 9 lettered characters for each slot, and are repeats which are (as far as I can tell) not used by the game's systems. More in the update below.
Back to compiling characters! It's a lot easier when you have a guide to tell you what will cover which portions of any given character. Hopefully it won't take me too much longer to get ALL of the pieces. After that, I'll start over with Vodun's pictogram again to see if I can get it right!

Something else I noticed -- I can't get any second gen pictogram to load while browsing profiles; they all 'move' continuously. However, some of them have pieces that don't 'move'. On a hunch, I viewed the source -- and sure enough, the 'names' don't match up quite right. Some bug in the code, I assume. I'll have to look into that later~

Anyway, I wanted to write all this down before I forgot it all. Will update when I get further!

Update: Shaku, Ravus, and I chatted a bit in the comments here, so you can see things get worked out that way if you want, but I'll include a summary here too.

Since the numbers 1-9 in the first through third slots are just repeats (and don't appear to be used), there aren't actually any 'missing pieces.' Turns out I misread Vodun's false 1st gen pictogram from the screenshot.
This is the pictogram I was seeing for Vodun. Converted into a 2nd gen pictogram, we get this. His real pictogram can be found here. Notice that, again, there is one character difference - the fourth.
At this point, I noticed that every pictogram I wanted to translate ended in 1. If you look at the screenshot above, you'll see that EVERY deer (except Rire) has a square in the bottom center of their pictogram. This square is the character which corresponds to the number 1 in the fourth slot. A second screenshot of different deer confirms this:

(*A note about the fawn on the far left and the doe below)
I suspect that, since 1st gen pictos use four characters in the URL, and 2nd gen use 5 (all have the prefix 1), the game misinterpreted the way the 2nd gen pictograms were meant to be read and substituted the 1. Why the 1? I have two guesses: One, that the game read the prefix 1 from each 2nd gen name, or Two, that the game ignored the prefix 1 altogether since (even though characters 1-9 are available in slots 1-3) numbers aren't used in pictograms for the first three slots, but still included it in its count on how many characters it should be reading and therefore lacked a character to fill the fourth void and put in the first thing it could think of. Likely, the prefix "1" is what specifies a gen2 picto from a gen1 picto. That's written terribly, but hopefully it makes some sort of sense to someone other than myself.
I had been working on figuring out what order the swf files were assigned to the naming system, and I knew that it went 1-0 rather than 0-9 because of the mistake I made earlier (look up again - slots 1 through 3 will allow you to put characters 1-9, but not a 0! That's because 0, in this case, is actually 10). This would make sense, because if the swf files were assigned in the order 1-0 and then letters, 1 would be the first character to come up for slot 4 every time.

So, the good news - I figured it out!
The bad news - I can only translate 3/4 of every pictogram I have a screenshot of, so if Rire doesn't recognise you right off the bat, I appologise :<

*Note - These two deer, for some reason, lack the "4-1" character. Both have two characters in common, however. I don't know why this is. Probably just another glitch in the way the game was reading and translating the pictograms. Also, does anybody know who the deer in this picture are? Rire had fun with them.
Edit: Found the white deer in-game again, with the same pictogram (Her name is Leyawiin). Looks like that one is actually a real 1st gen pictogram. The fawn's might be, too, if the player just clicked 'play as fawn' in his/her settings. I believe it's Atvana.

Update2: Something else I've noticed. Even with the patch update, all of the second gen pictograms are missing a piece. I guess this further supports the "TEF client isn't reading one of the characters for some reason so it fills in a blank" theory. I've seen several people mention something like "his/her pictogram looks a little different in-game," and for one example, you can see that Ravus has two vertical bars on either side of the "X" character, but in-game these are missing.
It looks like it may be that everyone (or most everyone) sees his/her pictogram correctly, as well, but others' may be wrong. Karuna's looks off in Ravus's screenshots (and mine), but in his it's the right one.




Been meaning to do this for a while.
It involves this link:
http://endlessforest.org/machine/playerpage.php?symbol=

When you click a symbol on the in-forest map from the site, this is the link you get. At the end of that goes the 'true name' of a pictogram. This link will re-direct you to any pictogram's login name and bio.
For example, Rire's:

http://endlessforest.org/machine/playerpage.php?symbol=owly

This will take you directly to my page.
Now if you can re-construct a pictogram, you can find who it belongs to. This, in effect, allows you to reverse-find players. Map glitching today? NO PROBLEM. You no longer need a login name OR the map to find out who a pictogram belongs to, as long as you can build the pictogram's 'true name' yourself.
This also has a few random applications, such as finding the player names of deer with similar pictograms.
Edit: WARNING. If the player's login name is the same as the name of someone's blog, and the blog was created before the player joined the community site, you will get the wrong page. However, this will still tell you the player's username.
For example, my deer Candlelight is 1Ldq6 -- but this will direct you to this post by LighttheSky, since Candlelight is newer than that post. Notice the URL is endlessforest.org/community/Candlelight] -- this is where you need to look in those instances. Adding a hyphen and then a number will eventually get you to the user's page.
Candlelight's is http://www.endlessforest.org/community/Candlelight-0

I will be uploading some files which make decoding pictograms simple, soon. Until they're up, check out La's Pictogram Catalog

The Pictogram Builders have MOVED! Please find the downloads and a guide on how to use them HERE.