Sprite Experimenting

[TristanBeoulve]

I can't really do much of the actual editing for FFT, but I have a curiosity on a few things, this being one such thing:

If any of you have played any WRPGs lately (Western RPG) You'll know that pretty much all of them feature character creation. What I'm wondering is if you can do something similar to character creation. Now, before anyone starts to lecture me on how IMPOSSIBLE that would be, hear me out. What I mean is that I'm wondering if somehow one could make many slightly different sprites. To illustrate, I'll explain what I propose:

So, say I make 3 sprites. All are the same, except one has blond hair, one has brown hair, and the other has black hair. What I want to do is make it so that with these, you can have different character appearances and more complicated combinations are available. Is it possible to implement something right at the start of a patch, so that you can use sliders or something to do such a thing? If not, please explain why this is impossible, or if there would be another way to do such a thing.

If I'm lucky and it IS possible, please tell me how I can do such a thing, because that would be amazing. I dabbled in RPG Maker (a program that allows you to make a fairly advanced game, set character progression, events, and other cool things simply) and found a way to let the player change armor color using a dye shop, (I was playing it recently, and it occurred to me that I should ask you guys on here) and my brother told me it was great. Sorry if this just sounds stupid, but please, comment if you have any additional insights.

[TristanBeoulve]

Pardon my accidental screw-up in part of the explanation. The dye shop was only for clothes, and additionally, you could also make a character portrait using one of the character creation tools.

[Angel]

To quote Xifanie: anything is possible as long as it is within the hardware's limits (disc space, RAM, Video RAM, processor, etc.). This is the sort of thing that would be possible but completely unreasonable. The type1/type2/etc sprite sheet format doesn't allow for anything of the sort, so you would need to completely replace the existing format to allow for such a change. Then there's the matter of EVTCHRs, of which Ramza has a very large number, and would mean this feature could only be realistically used in a story-free patch. Even implementing a palette selecting tool would be quite difficult, since the limited palette results in colors being reused between body parts to fade otherwise unrelated colors, which leaves almost zero room for customization that wouldn't either look awful or require a complete redraw.

This and other reasons make this feature something that would only be reasonable if you were making a game from scratch, because implementing it in an existing game - particularly on a platform with very limited VRAM - would be much much much more work in the end.

[TristanBeoulve]

Thanks, Toshiko.