Final Fantasy Hacktics

I finally figured out how to do some of this custom sprite work that you kids are all up on about these days.

I think this turned out pretty well. I just need some help from someone in getting that portrait onto the sprite. I read the topic where Zozma helped someone out, but got completely lost in the sentence that explained all of it. Could someone break it down in simple steps for this old man?

By the way, ALL GLORY TO KANBABRIF!

Portraits aren't quite figured out yet I believe, at least on the PSP version.
They are iffy.

Portraits are figured out in most parts of the game. Are you trying to figure out the battle sprite portrait, because that is easy enough. The formation portrait stuff is a bit more complicated.

Battle.

I don't actually need formation portraits.

Battle portrait goes in the sprite sheet. Look at others to see what I mean.

Are you having trouble getting the palette to work with the portrait? To get this to work I used GraphicsGale. I have only been using it for a few days but it is a good program so far. Just take a BMP of your complete sprite sheet, with 16 colors for the sprite and 16 for the portrait and open it in Graphics Gale. Change the "Color Depth" (I think that is one of the options in the View menu) to 256 colors. Now the palette side window in GraphicsGale should have two rows of 16 colors, the first row is your sprite colors and the second is your portrait colors. So basically just drag all your portrait colors down to the 9th row of the palette window. Save and import with ShiShiSpriteEditor and check out the first portrait palette. It should look correct. I'm writing this from memory, have only used these tools for a couple days, and am leaving out a whole bunch of important details, but that should solve your problem for now and from that info I think you know more than enough to figure out the rest for yourself.

Well, I had two main obstacles. The first was getting the portrait in, and the second was not being able to import a fully decompressed BPM sprite file into Shishi, so I always had Zalmo's sprite reappear during attack animations.

Your directions succeeded in getting the portrait in, AS WELL AS suddenly allowing me to import the complete sprite edit into Shishi! Now, Zalmo doesn't appear during attack animations!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!

The problem, though, is that I might have messed something up on the sprite sheet when I was editing.. because the attack animation is glitchy. The right colors, but glitchy. So I'm going to have to play with that for awhile. Any tips on how to properly edit the lower half of a fully decompressed sprite sheet (everything below the portrait)?

Because I edited those in much the same way I edited the top half.. Where everything looks like it should and nothing goes outside of the original sprite lines. I'll attach the image, to see if anyone can spot the mistakes I made.

(By the way, the portrait looks normal in this particular file because this was the pre-GraphicsGale file).

Your welcome.

As for your newest issue I'm not quite sure yet. I know that others have mentioned similar issues and I had the same thing happen to me today (though in my case I was trying to mess it up). They were talking about it somewhere in the Custom Sprite section so look around. The only thing I remember is that they talked about insuring that there are actually only 16 colors in the sprite. So maybe even though you have your palette correct you still have some stray pixels here and there. I will be looking into the problem more tomorrow, but tell me if you find a solution before I do.

PS: The sprite looks good. I wonder if you could make the hat a little taller though? You can't make it too high because everything would wack out, but maybe a pixel or two.

Well, actually, I can't. The problem is that the SPR file is just slightly bigger than the one I'm replacing. So when I import it into the image file with CDMage, it says it will only import if I agree to truncate.

When I reopen the SPR file in Shishi, I can see the first line below the portrait has shifted things around, which in turn shifted everything below them. Hence, a tangled mesh of arms and such when attacking.

So the problem is that I may have added too many pixels in the editing process, and CDMage insists on truncating during import, which causes the shift. (In a nutshell). I'm slowly trying to figure out what I can safely erase to bring the pixel count down. It's just a matter of comparing my sprite to the original I worked with, and erasing anything that went outside of the lines. If that makes sense.

I knew that my final SPR file was supposed to be the same size as the original.. but I have no idea HOW it got bigger. I suppose I wasn't as careful as I thought when copy-pasting that damned hat around!

Here. To illustrate what I'm seeing..

When I go through the Shishi process, everything looks fine. I save it as an SPR file, use CDMage to import it into my image file, and then it says it's too big and asks to truncate.

So I go back into Shishi, open the SPR file, and this is what I see:

Strange... I only did a palette change on my Chaos Knight sprite,but it showed the same message about it being bigger, however nothing at all is glitchy. Then again, palette changes are a bit different than making new sprites...

RRAARRGGH! I feel so stupid right now.

I figured out what went wrong. When I first started this sprite, I was editing Zalmo's sprite. However, in my efforts to put it into the game, I was trying to replace Funeral. There's a significant difference between Zalmo's file size and Funeral's!!

I think I can make this work now.

Alright then. So I have this down to two options:

Working Kanbabrif sprite who's head morphs into Zalmo's head during attack animations (if I transfer BMPs through FFTSprite)

or

Working Kanbabrif sprite who's entire being morphs into pixelated vomit during attack animations (if I transfer BMPs through Shishi).


So I'm sticking with the Zalmo head for now. His robe colors don't change, though, so it's pretty damn close. Really, it just looks like he has to take his hat off in order to attack.. and his beard. What can you do?

Download your Kanbabrif TODAY!

Can you post the image in BMP that you are using for the portrait? The on attached to the entire sprite sheet you posted earlier looks a little garbled.

Sure thing

And here's the original portrait, before I had to cut it up to match the shape of Zalmo's face.

Oh my friend, you are slightly mistaken about some things haha. You don't have to have the portrait match the outline of the one you are overwriting exactly. The tan area for the negative space for the portrait has just as much value as all the other colors in the portrait. The portrait only needs to fit in the general rectangle of the portrait area (because those are the coordinates that the game grabs the image from). The same thing applies to the sprites pretty well too, there are just rectangles that slice up the sprite sheet into squares and paste everything together. So your sprite can go outside the bounds of your base, it just can't go outside of the bounds of the invisible rectangle (which we don't exactly know where that is). Though last I heard Melonhead was working on something to help us with that. I will take a look at what you got here and see what I come up with. Expect something in either 30 minutes or later tomorrow.

UPDATE: So I'm thinking the main issue is that the rip of the portrait you are using is no good. That is probably messing up your attack animations too because it is screwing up your palette. Basically JPEGs are the bane of a spriters existance.

UPDATE2: Okay so I have run out of time for the night to finish this up. But don't you worry, you can look forward to a fun suprise later tomorrow.

Wow.. Thanks, Cheetah!

I figured the portrait area wasn't actually that tricky. However, after a few hundred attempts to get this thing fixed, I was running out of ideas.

If you can pull this off, I promise that your name will have a place in the ending credits of the Chronicles!

Now that I know that, about being able to draw a little more, then perhaps we can make his hat taller. I don't know. I'll go ahead and post the pic of what Kanbabrif looks like in the game. If you want to try working with it, then by all means. If not, I may make some adjustments after you finish.

Who's your Mac OSX Daddy, I'm your Mac OSX Daddy (okay sorry, I just like puns).

So here are some screenshots to illustrate the situation. The first two pics illustrate that your attack animations for Kanbabrif now work and are not garbled. I believe they were messed up because you were using way too many colors at least in the stuff you gave me to work off of. Even if you changed the palette correctly in GraphicsGale you probably would have had to do some other stuff to actually eliminate those "colors" from the BMP file. I will explain this more later.

Picture 3 shows off a perfect looking portrait. The reason this wasn't working was because the rip of the portrait you had was messed up from compression most likely. Lesson: Don't use jpegs, png are best for most things.

The rest of the pictures show some of the minor mistakes that you need to correct on your sprite. First off your coloring of his body from the front view has the neck of the robe change from blue to off-white in a couple of frames (should be an easy fix for you). The more complicated issue is that Kanbabrif is missing his beard when he attacks from the front view. For these frames the head is placed on seperate from the body, and while making sure to not "color outside the lines" you failed to put a beard in either place. An understandable mistake considering it might be somewhat difficult to fix. I would recommend looking at other bearded sprites to see how they delt with it. My other recommendation is that the beard probably belongs on the body because the bounds around his head probably aren't big enough to allow for his beard (might take a bit of work and testing either way).

Other than those things it looks great. I will post the bmp I used with all the correct colors shortly. All you have to do is import it into any sprite using ShiShi and it will work great. I would recommend using GraphicsGale to do your edits to make sure you don't mess up the palette settings.

Curses, apparently only three attachments per post. No I guess it doesn't like me posting that portrait picture, I will try doing that later.

EDIT: Okay I just needed to reduce the size of the pic I guess, here is the portrait.

The beard issue is definitely solvable by attaching it to the body.

I'm having a similar issue with my Male Warrior right now except its with his spiky hair. unfortunately for me I can't attach the 5 extra pixels to the head or the body.

Can you post it so I can take a look?

Thanks again!

When I get through with him, he'll be perfect. And, like I said before, when I start remaking the Chronicles, your name will definitely be put in the "Extra Special Thanks" section of the credits! Just let me know if you want it to say "Cheetah" or if you'd prefer another alias.

More than anything, I'm glad you explained some of these trickier color aspects to me. I learned a thing or two about photoshop's ability to hide things from me!

hey i saw an aeris in one of your sceenshots, how far along is she?

Oh, yeah, I see her too. I can't wait for that sprite!

i actually wouldnt mind if the flower basket wasnt there, it would make it alot easier to animate....

Yep you spotted her there. She isn't any where near being complete, just walking animations which I got done like 2 months ago. The basket does make it a pain. But I would really like to keep it in her walking animations at least, so I will see what happens. The problem is that her arms are seeming rather unique and Reis is the closest fit I have found thus far.

reis huh? why not make a version without the basket first, and then go back later and do that specially.... it seems it would be alot easier to start without it.....  using reis' arms for now, if you edit the walking arms to match more closely the rest is hardly noticeable if its not completely matching

I believe it would be easier to do it with the basket first. Then I would only need to erase the arms from two walking frames (the back/side and front/side), because I think those are the only frames that ever have the other arm animations attached to them. The toughest part is not knowing how much space is allotted for each arm, and where exactly the attaching point is. The only way to figure out this stuff now is extensive testing. I know that Melonhead had some kind of thing going to put sprites together, but I haven't heard anything about that is a while. Thoughts?

the reason i think without the basket first is because with reis's arms, everything is almost done already..... itll be great when that new sprite edit version is out...

Well if I was to use Reis arms for everything I would have to delete the original arms out of all the other Aeris frames. With plan I would only have to delete it out of two and still use Reis's arms for everything else. It will be pretty tough regardless though, and will take me a while. But yeah if there is a release of a graphics previewer it would go a lot faster.

i hear ya, i started animating the little 10yo boy and gave him squire arms for everything else but having to test and re open and test an reopen making screenshots every few minutes its such a pain.... i have a half complete 10yo boy sprite because i have to see where the arms allign and where needs work.

Yeah I have been trying to wrap my head around some strategies for testing out the placement of the arms. This is important for completing my Blue mage sprite too. So far the best thing I can think to do is to start out with a "sprite" that is a grid with lines of two pixels and have all the cells numbered. Then just continue to test and adjust till you have a breakdown of where the border is for each part of the sprite. But even after all that you still wouldn't know where the arms are attached. There has to be a simpler way of doing this by looking at the code, but I'm not the guy for that.

also theres the fact that there are two different layouts for humans sprites.

as you must know by now some characters harms attach at a different place, and i dont think its because the pixels are all in a different place, i think its because the attachment is coded slightly different.. the dancers, as well as alma, and teta are an example...

paste a sprite like ramza in there and youll see

Sorry to interrupt, guys, but..

KANBABRIF WORKS NOW!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Q4xPkb0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Q4xPkb0)

Cheetah, you're going to soon find yourself tired of me thanking you over and over again. But THANKS AGAIN AND AGAIN!

I'll attach the SPR file for anyone who wants it. The only thing I didn't do was add the blue/gold sleeves for every action-arm movement. I don't think it matters too much right now. Maybe someday, when I don't have school work to get back to, I'll touch those up.

interrupt? hehe dont apologize, i interrupted not you :D

nice work ill prob throw it into mine somewhere

@Cheetah: the problem with mine is just that the heads have a few pixels that fall outside the area of the special heads used in the attack animation. So whenever my Warriors attack their spiky hair sort of disappears.

Here, I edited this one to make his special heads look a little more spiky, but they look shrunken now. If I use the full hair the file size goes north.

(http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/hh189/koala_knight/WorkingWarriorMfitted.jpg)

Alrighty, well, now that that's taken care of.. on to the next project.

*EDIT* Spoilers removed; volunteers no longer needed.

BastardPoetry: Well thank you very much for the recognition and thanks. It is good to be appreciated, even though I didn't do that much haha. I would be happy to contribute to your project, but I don't have that much time to work on stuff. I'm happy to help out where I can though, and I give you full permission to use whatever other sprites I have worked on. Which would pretty much be my Red Mage and an Aeris sprite that can walk lol.

Vanya: I think it looks good. I mean you are basing it off the monk hair and it looks pretty much the same. You also have to think about the fact that those are from when he is leaning forward to attack (I think they are at least), so it makes sense that his hair wouldn't be as high because it is pointing more forward. Are you going to remove the headband? I might have liked your last hairdue for him more.

that really does look good vanya. nice job

Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.
But the way it is right now the difference is really noticeable. The thing is that when he attacks it clearly looks like his hair shrinks in a very unnatural way. My other version is just as bad. If I just remove the protruding pixels then it looks like he has amazing, disappearing spikes. I wish I could just swap it for another, larger sprite.

Okay, so I'm working on the new opening credits of the Chronicles. I have it set to say, at one point:

"Featuring Custom Sprites
by
Cheetah, Kuraudo Sutoraifu, Zozma
and Bastard Poetry"

I have a couple of questions:

1) Would you be alright with me using your sprites, Zozma? Because I put your name there in anticipation of finding great use with some of yours!

2) Would anyone else like to contribute sprites for the series? I can always add more names to that list!

Whoops. Forgot someone:

Vanya. May I use your sprites as well?

you're welcome to anything i've posted help yourself dude

Sure! By all means I would love to see them used. =)

Thanks guys!