Final Fantasy Hacktics

Alright so I need to know  how to get custom sprites working on FFT WOTL. I'm trying to get Sephiroth, Reno, Tifa, Barret, Alucard, Snake, Tidus, Vincent, Zack and Aerith (Aeris) so that they'd show on the unit screen and in battle. I've downloaded Lion Editor and Shishi Sprite Editor. what I'm aiming here is to get them in a way Unique so that it won't replace any original Uniques (in example Cloud or Agrias) and so that there won't be multiple of the same character (In example like every Squire being Zack. if this is possible i mean) so yeah... I need an Idiot proof guide of it.I'm trying to prove to my friend that this is indeed possible and i also want to experience the awesomeness that I am missing now   I've tried reading other tutorials about spriting but the only thing I achieved was that i ruined my save file >_<" and now i'm hoping that I'd be able to start a new one with the characters stated above and still be able to gain the characters that are gainable without FFT hacking ^_^

not possible.

There's a very limited number of free sprite slots, and even less free job slots.  Something somewhere has to be cut first.

But the actual mechanics of turning Agrias in Tifa (e.g.) is a rather simple function of both lion editor and shishi.

Regardless, WELCOME TO FFH, WHERE ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE.

1.  You cant get them without hacking

2.  I'll tell you right now, It's not possible to get all those characters in the game the way you want because there is a limit to replaceable formation screen sprites (At most without losing any special characters or generics you can get 3 in) and you'll need to do quite a bit of work in Shishi Sprite Editor, FFTPatcher, FFTEVGRP, and some work in Tactext (to get the lores and names down correctly) just to get those 3.  

3.  If you're willing to ignore them having glitchy formation screen sprite you can add quite a bit more than 3 (you'll be able to get most of them in there).

4.  If you're willing to do number 3 above and sacrafice some generics or special characters you'll be able to get them all in there.

The major roadblock is that you cant really add anything new, you can only replace things, and replacing requires sacraficing.

...Tch! well it can't be helped. time for plan B. I'm ready to sacrifice all except Ramza, Cloud and Balthier. any ideas?

Depends on what you want.  Do you still want them to have formation screen sprites? If so there 2 ways to go about this. There's a 3rd option if you don't care about formation screen sprites.

1.  Replace generic jobs that you don't want or need in your game.  But then generics will have access to them.  Even if you make it impossible for them to access at first by having the job require levels in itself they will eventually learn it through spillover JP, to fix that you'll need an ASM hack to stop spillover JP.

2.  Replace special character.  The issure here is that most special characters have cutscenes that they are involved in, if you don't care about the cutscenes then you're all fine.  But if you do you'll need to do some event editing to fix that, which is a time consuming and requires more knowledge than I have.

3.  If you don't care about formation screen sprites then it's easy, there are several characters that utilize multiple spritesheets, simply replace one of them and edit the ENTDs to replace all occurances of the altered sprite with their other sprite.

You could use a combination of 1, 2, and 3 to achieve your goal as well.

There's a spriting tutorial in the Help forums if you need to help on that.

You'll also need to create skillsets and alter jobs stuff for your characters.  e.g. Marach has 2 spritesheets, one of them is linked to a job that has zeroes in both the multiplier and growth values as well as always starting off dead. (The dead one is the one most people replace seeing as the other is the one that joins your party)

well to start off i don't care if they happen to have cutscenes and if Sephiroth or any other will say odd things in them. and I want them to show in formation screen as well. but I just need a guide on how to get the characters to work and make them show up in the formations screen

To have them show up in the formation screen you'll need to replace sprites of characters that have formation screen sprites.  Every special character that joins has a formation screen sprite, all generics have a formation screen sprite, and a couple other characters.  Formation screen sprites are stored in the UNIT.bin file.  The very last post of the spriting tutorial is by me I go over how to replace formation screen sprites.

Essentially what you need to do is:

1.  Replace Sprite
2.  Edit Job, skillset
3.  Edit ENTD
4.  Edit UNIT.BIN

I'd give you a personal tutorial but I'm in class right now.  If you can wait I'll post a tutorial or upload a video tutorial later tonight when I'm done with school and work.  Most of the information you need is scattered throughout the boards you can look for it and ue that as well if you cant wait.

Alright! I'll see what I can do. I'll drop a message here if i figured it out. Thanks a lot!

what do i do when the custom sprite size exceeds the maximum sprite size? i'm trying to replace the sprites with Shishi sprite manager. and will i be able to change the characters name? if so with what program do i do that?

The newest release of Shishi does not let you exceed the maximum byte size.  However if you download the older version (I have version .352 which you can get from the lioneditor google page) it can force in sprites which are larger than the maximum.

alright i got the sprites done now how do i rename the characters?

You'll need to use Tactext and replace the name of the person you replaced with the new characters name.  You'll want to be careful, while Tactext is far more stable than it used to be it still can cause issues.  I recommend creating copies of your currently edited ISO as backup.  What you want to do with Tactext is edit the text while keeping the data size increase to a minimum.

Crap! I'm a friggin idiot.  Completely forgot about Lioneditor.  If you've already got the characters in your party you can use lionditor to just rename them.

hey i think i got it. i got the sprites changed, now i'm renaming the characters, skills (I can handle this myself) etc but will the characters show in formations screen? if not then how can i fix that?
a HUGE thank you for all who helped!

Editing the UNIT.BIN with FFTEVGRP is how you change the formation screen sprites.  you need to replace the sprite of the old character with the new characters sprite.  e.g.  You replace Cloud with Sephiroth, you'll need load up UNIT.BIN in FFTEVGRP export cloud's sprite and crop Sephiroth's sprite over his and reinsert the new sprite.

how do i get Unit.bin? i tried CD mage but it didn't show the file. i have EU version of the game and i'm not betting on it but does that have something to do with it?

Look under the EVENTS or WORLD folders.  It's in there.

uhh... that's the problem. it doesn't have EVENTS or WORLD folder. the only folders there are SYSDIR and USRDIR and I can't find EVENTS or WORLD folder anywhere. =/

Oh, you have the PSP version.  Then I wouldn't know.

1. First you'll want to create a new folder on your desktop or whereever your workspace is.

2. Load up your ISO in UMDGen.

3  In the USRDIR directory there should be a fftpack.bin, extract that out to your workspace.

4. Next you'll want to load up FFTPatcher.

5. Under the PSP menu thereshould be a utilities  section, select "Extact fftpack.bin..."

6. Select your fftpack.bin that you extracted when prompted and hit open.

7. When prompted to select a location to extract to select the folder in step 1, FFTPatcher will extract all the files inside to that location.

If you look inside the folder you'll have a bunch of folders and files.  The UNIT.BIN is inside the EVENT folder.  Once your done editing the file you'll need to rebuild the fftpack.bin with FFTPatcher and insert the newly created fftpack.bin into the ISO using UMDGen.

I've got everything working so far thanks to your help, but when i try to import the bmp it says it's not 16bit. how do i fix this?

Use GraphicsGale to make it 8/16 bit.

i got graphicsgale now what? (I never have used graphicsgale or any other picture editing program before >_<")

Although I recommend you do all your editing in graphicsgale I've never used it either.  I use paint but I don't recommend you use MS Paint, you will experience very bad colorloss when saving as 16 color even though the sprites only use 16 colors.

Just so you know the sprite in the UNIT.BIN is just the front-right facing sprite, so you'll need to remove all the other stuff if you're working from a exported spritesheet.  The sprites in the UNIT.BIN are 24x40 pixels including the black background.

1.how do i remove the other stuff and make them as 16 colors?
2. or could you post the necessary .bmp files here? that would help a lot.
if you can post I'd need these 10:
(i know 10 seems like a huge project but i honestly would love to see this whole thing work)
Alucard (Symphony of the Night)
Tidus (Final Fantasy X)
Tifa (Final Fantasy 7)
Reno (Final Fantasy 7)
Sephiroth (Final Fantasy 7)
Barret Wallace (Final Fantasy 7)
Vincent Valentine (Final Fantasy 7)
Zack Fair (Final Fantasy 7)
Aeris (Final Fantasy 7)
Snake (Metal Gear Solid)
(all found in the custom sprites download section)

The ones in the download section *should* be ready for importing into the game as they are.  I'm not sure what's causing your problem.

The problem isn't importing it's croping and converting the right-front facing sprite into 16 color bitmap, so that they can be imported into the UNIT.BIN with FFEVGRP.

@XUltimaX

I'll see what I can do. I might take awhile since I've got homework and 5 papers to write.  I'll do what I can and post them as I finish them.

Alright thank you. I understand on the homework part. that reminds me i have to return to writing theory stuff myself >.<". well I'll be patient and wait.

i have one question for you.
If I have replaced the sprites with Shishi and placed the .bmp files with FFTEVGRP in the UNIT.BIN, will it completely replace the character sprites (so it shows in game graphic cutscenes, the Party Roster menu and in the unit selection screen that appears before a battle)?

Yes, if I'm not mistaken it will, except for the cutscenes, I belive that's controlled by a different file.

well i used shishi a bit earlier and replaced Agrias with Tifa and she showed up as Tifa so i suppose it works. even if it won't it doesn't truly matter sence the story won't make much sense at all with the replacements, and i'm pretty sure the story dialog can be changed but that's beyond my interest. (btw what do you think of my avatar? i made it look like myself )

btw if in example when Orlandeu's sprites are replaced with Sephiroth's sprites can i change class for "Sephiroth" in game while maintaining Sephiroth's sprites or do i have to keep him as a sword saint to keep him looking like Sephiroth?

You can change classes.  So long as the base sprite is "Orlandeau", he'll look like Sephiroth regardless of what class he is.

Also I'll probably have one or two sprites uploaded later on today.  Finally have some free time, was at a family gathering for my grandma today.

what do you mean by "base sprite"? enlighten me

Base sprite is simply the sprite you have that character set to, this also controls the base job that they have access to (for generics it would be squire, for the special characters it their special class).  Generic characters utilize the Generic Male or Generic Female base (this allows the sprites to change to look like the different generic jobs when they change Jobs).  The special characters utilize their own special base sprite so they don't change regardless of what class they are in.

so... correct me if i'm mistaken, but i can change Orlandeu's sprite or is it what i'm not supposed to do? i know if i change the generic squire or monk in example i'll have all squires or monks looking like Sephiroth, and i don't want that

Yes, changing Orlandeau's sprite is what you want to do if you want to avoid having generics look like sephiroth.

Also here's 4 UNIT.BIN sprites I got done for you.

thanks! keep it up do i just right click and save? and will they have their customised portraits?

also is there a way to fix the OPEN.LZW error in tactexteditor? (just try and bear with me xD)

Yes, you should be able to right-click and save.

Portraits?  No, the portrait for the formation screen is in the WLDFACE.BIN.  Those are for just the formation screen sprite which is in the UNIT.BIN.  I dunno about the tactext error.  I generally only use the quickedit to avoid errors.

so will it then be so that it's the original portrait and custom sprite? if so then could this be fixed as well? my best guess is that it needs the .bmp image of the portrait. afterall it is with the same program was it not?

In battle you'd have the custom portrait and sprite, but outside of battle the original portrait would be used, so like the formation screen would have the original portrait.  It could be fixed using FFTEVGRP just like with the UNIT.BIN but there one problem.  The portraits are all screwed up because it's using the wrong palatte colors and that's beyond my scope of skill.  You'll need someone else to tell you how to fix that.

ah well that's ok. it won't ruin my day. the aim is to get the characters have their respective names portraits and sprites at least in battle. but i'd rather have the sprites show up in the formations screen as well

hey umm... can you post me an un-edited fftactext file (.ffttext) ? I've messed up and I can't edit without it and it won't let me create a new one. also in fftactext editor from where do i edit character names?

Do you have a clean ISO?  You can just restore your TacText file from that.  Even better, you can restore whatever file is giving you problems.

no I've messed up my backup as well by accident >_<"

Ok, not sure how it would help but here ya go.

thanks. it helps me to start over in fftactext editor because mine gave me an error message everytime i tried to patch it, due to the fact that i may have messed up at some point.