So yeah. Here's my first attempt at a sprite, using MasterGrand's Young Ramza Noble as a base, and then getting the cape from Vanya's Alternate Aliste, and messing with the palette a bit, fixing the cape and scarf. I know its not perfect but hopefully its good enough for someone?
P.S. i dont know if there's a specific format i'm supposed to follow so i'm just going to post a preview and the full sprite.
Edit: Oh yeah i didnt change the portrait from the original Young Noble Ramza. I liked it and i'm lazy.
Ramza as a successor to Wiegraf, hmm? I would personally consider this as the ordinary 4th Chapter instead of that awful design they went with for that. Regardless it looks pretty good, I do see a few mistakes. Also why is Ramza's hair no longer blonde? Not enough colors?
No, LD, MasterGrand, to be honest, failed with his Ramza Noble sprite, colors were saturated, head was edited in a wrong way. It would be easier to just copy paste Ramza head into Wiegraf, he went some other way...
Wow i didnt even notice the color difference in the hair. After looking in the game it does seem to be closer to the color of the generic sprite, and vastly different from argath/algus' bright yellow hair.
By the way when referring to places and characters, do most people use the WotL translation or the original psx version? Personally i like the WotL translation better, it makes much more sense on the whole, but i do wish they would have kept some of the older names, like sAlgus and Sweegy Woods.
We usually use PSX one, but if you say Loffrey, everyone will know you talk about Rofel.
Alright so I was going to attempt to convert the flan sprite from revenant wings, but it felt like a huge daunting task and I didn't knw where to begin. So I decided to do something a little easier first, the cactite. So far I think I have the walking animations done, and will post it later tonight after I get home from work.
Alright here are the walking animations for the cactite so far. Critiques are welcome, though I will say this is literally a direct port from the FF12:RW sprite, so i'm really looking for errors like extraneous pixels and unaligned frames.
I'm curious as to how this'll look in game. Have you done -any- in-game testing yet, or are you waiting until more frames are done?
Well i am by no means an expert in color compatability or whatever. I do know that this cactite is significantly smaller than most FFT characters, but i find that to be okay, because the cactite is only supposed to be about knee height anyway (according to the visuals in Final Fantasy XII). I have tested the animations in game so far, and have tried to align each frame properly. Unfortunately there were only three walking frames available in the RW version of the sprite, so instead of creating two new frames, i just repeated them. It looks like the cactite walks a little faster than normal as a result, but i don't think it looks like anything is skipped.
I also had to do a horizontal flip for the back frames since they were the other way around in the RW sprite, but that took all of five seconds after i realized that he wasnt facing the same direction as everyone else.
Next i will do the ZOMG i got hit frames (should be almost done with those) and the ARRGH i hit you frames (so counterattacks don't make him disappear). But i won't get those done or posted until tomorrow at about 9pm U.S. Central time.
I unfortunately have to be up in 6 hours so no more work on this tonight. Happy to answer your questions.
(P.S. if you get bored, throw it in shishi's on top of an SP1 monster sprite. I am currently using the treant sprite slot for testing. it should look okay but i would like your opinion as well.)
It shouldnt be overly difficult to create the extra 2 (4) walking frames from the RW sprites. Only the feet and arms move right?
- Just had a closer look of have you've set up the sprite, it probably will look like it is going abnormally fast and haste will cause it to look crazy fast. I still suggest you make the extra frames.
(Does the program you are using have an onion skin option? that would really help if you did decide to make the frames)
Onion skin option? I think Gale has it, heh. As to walking frames, 3 are totally enough, I have only three for Lamia, Titan, Werewolf and Tonberry, and they all walk at the same speed as any other monster. FFT original monsters have 5 frames for walking, but those two frames are really the same(leg forward arm back, and other way arond) with few pixels changed. I will see if this Cactice really walks fast, it shouldn't though...
It does seem to walk a little fast, though I have not yet tried hasting it to see the crazy speed. And yeah, I'm using graphics gale. Not sure what the onion skin option is but I will look into it. Thanks for the feedback guys.
I looked closer on it. First thing, erase those small brown dots on hands, SE tries to cram too much detail on RW sprites(Titan is a great example too), use palette from FFT, this helps the sprite right away. Also, they tried to make the torn on sprites visible, a very bad move, too small detail for already a small sprite. Last thing, you placed frames in wrong order, so no wonder it is going wild. I will post a slightly changed version with proper placement in 10-15 minutes.
Edit: Here you go, fixed the sprites needles and browns. Note that you still have to change palette and fix movement on back frames. Use another monster to see how movement works(I used Lamia to see it).
I like the size; should make a funny enemy.
Well as for the frame order of the animations, i've been going on this:
http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=3834.0 (http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=3834.0)
Is this wrong?
Alright, well i'll take a look at your fix and work on that. It doesnt look like you removed the needles from the back frames but that should take all of five seconds.
And as far as replacing the palette, you're saying that i should go through all the default sprites to find colors that are as close as possible to the current ones, and then use those?
Also, would people be interested in other palettes other than just green? I think it might be funny to have a blue or red cactite as well, and the default RW also contains brown, gray and apparently pink.
As you can see, it was wrong. Use the monsters I made to know placement, I studied a lot on them so movement is ok on all of those(though Twinees knows better how to place them, mine are "drunk", hehe). And like I said, I wasn't touching back frames, you can do it yourself.
lol got frustrated trying to make more walking frames.
IMMA FIRIN' MAH LAZOR!
I know another monster sprite I want to use if it gets finished.
I don't care if I only ever use it in a Zeklaus Desert random battle, lol.
Although its funny, please stay on topic.
Here's a little bit of help for you RandMuadDib (you can remove the spiky bits).
Alright that actually helps a lot i think, especially when i compare them to the original three. Now i kinda know what i have to do to finish those other frames. I appreciate it twinees!
@RavenOfRazgriz: This will be finished. Might take two months (hopefully going to be moving in two weeks) but it will be finished.
Edit: Okay so here's what i've got so far. I've taken out the browns on the hands, removed the needles, used the extra frames from twinees and added the extra back frames that i made myself. I've also added the 'got hit' frames. Please ignore the numbers, they're so i can test stuff and won't be in the final product. Also, for both front and back, 1, 3, and 5 are from the RW sprite, 2 and 4 have been created as filler frames, 3 is the 'standing still' frame, and the sequence is 3,4,5,4,3,2,1,2 (repeat). It would probably be easier to picture/visualize if i used the numbers -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, but i'm too lazy to change them now.
I'm excited about this sprite btw, keep up the good work ^_^
Okay i've added jump, heal, and got hit frames. Take a look.
Edit: Added charging frames.
Edit 2: Dodging frames. Last edit for tonight.
Good job. I don't have any ISO, so I cannot test neither this, or my Hashmal...
Sad, i'd like to see a new hashmal.
My first attempt at gif making. GIMP is stupid and won't allow me to make the image smaller, so I have this big window on... Also, size is fucked, since I didn't think about it sooner. But you got to excuse me, this is my first attempt...
EDIT: Yay, it worked! I am currently working on another gif, so you can see more.
Sweet are you planning on just keeping it a gif or are going to do the full sprite? If you're doing the full sprite id love to use it in my patch the fft hashmal(um) is stupid.
Edit: also going to take a short break on cactite to fix my white knight ramza. I was new when I did that head swap and I can't stand the errors anymore. Gotta get rid of the yellow scarf, fix the hair color to ramzas natural color, and many of the heads need reworking. Especially the eyes that get discolored when he attacks.
Ditch Ramza, man. We already have tons of those headswaps. I am sure you can find such headswap somewhere anyway. And yeah, I am planning to do a full sheet, but only after I finish Ninja.
Alright so wtf. I tried loading my sprite sheet into shishis, and it got all craptastic. Any idea why?
Using .478 and it only happens with this sprite sheet, no other ones.
Double post for teh suck
Yeah its not for the community, though I will prolly submit when I'm done. I really like this sprite (or will when it stops looking like shit) and plan on using it for my ch4 ramza in my patch. Excited for hashmal sheet, looking forward to its completion.
At any rate, i think i figured out... no fixed.. what was going screwy with the sprite sheet. to say i figured it out implies i knew what was wrong, which is not the case, i just tried to fix it and somehow succeeded. I also managed to fix a lot of pixels that were trying to reference the portrait palette instead of the palette they were supposed to be. Take a look and see if anything else needs fixing, my eye is not as keen as many of yours.
Edit: Alright i threw it into tactics to use while checking some work i had done on cactite, and the white is really bright on his shoulder, and that needs to be fixed. Also, apparently the portrait is screwed up too. i know how to fix that as well but i'm lazy and it will take time. In the meantime, here are the critical and dead frames for cactite.
I had similiar problems with sprites, but when I replaced it again, everything was fixed. Cactice comes up nicely, I can't wait to test it in-game.
alright well sorry about the hiatus. Moved a couple of weeks ago and now i finally have internet. Just been so busy. So, once i sludge through all the new posts over the last few weeks i'll get working on this again. good to be back.
So i'm kinda stuck on what i want to do for the cactite's attack animation. Obviously he needs some sort of melee attack. Its prolly going to be an sp2 so i can have a needle throwing attack as well. The default attack from revenant wings is just the needle throwing attack. as far as i could find, it didnt have a melee attack.
Does anybody have any suggestions for a melee attack? Should i just do a head butt? or a punch? or a slam attack with both hands coming down from over his head? or something else that i haven't thought of yet?
Try mimicking the rush attack Pigs are using, simple and best tbh. Rest is all about your creativity.
Please correct me if i'm wrong, but which attack frames i need seem to depend on the bytes in the animations tab of the patcher for the attacks i plan to use? Does anyone have a list of the frames used for each animation? that would be incredibly helpful, might even be able to do two full attack animations with an SP1 sprite if each animation only uses some of the frames. I got a few while messing around, like
0A 43 00 use frames 1, 2, 3, and 4, where
0A 47 00 uses frames 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4
Secondly, i was also trying to consider what effect i'd use for a 1000 needles style attack. I was thinking poison frog might fit best, although even that one is kind of pushing it. Any thoughts?
That is heavily useful info RandMuadDib... you should record all of that if you have the time, should help people with making their own custom monsters.
As for animations... all that comes to mind is Repeating Fists or Soft.
Yeah i was afraid of that :/ I suppose i can check 16 abilities at a time if i give it a regular skillset. The problem is that psxfin doesnt let you have a framerate lower than the game's autodetect, and epsxe sucks. Anyone know of a decent emulator that lets you slow down play or let you record it and check it frame by frame?
You must not be using epsxe right, cause it doesn't suck.
I am looking forward to the Cactite portrait!! FF12 'cactar' is my favorite.
Yeah, I'd have to say stick with either Poison Frog or Repeating Fist... Or, if possible, combine the two to make a new effect; like keeping the initial beams from poison frog, and then when those hit the enemy, move in to Repeating Fist.
Nah that's not something I am capable of, not sure its something anyone is currently capable of, since the effect files also contain the sound and targeting data.
EDIT: Yeah portrait is the last thing i'm going to do i think.
ePSXe 1.6 runs 1000x smoother than 1.7 did. Holy crap. Now if i can just figure out how to take a video and analyze them 1 frame at a time. Can ePSXe do that innately, or do i need another program? and then what program should i use to advance the videos frame by frame? I plan on recording how long each animation frame is held, will be important.
EDIT2: Found a plugin that does video recording, and windows movie maker lets me check them frame by frame. Cataloged 00 through 1F so far, might be done within the week!
Any updates on this? I'm still really looking forward to the sprite and hoping to include it in my patch : )