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Chrono Trigger Modification / Chrono Trigger Dialogue Box Gradient?
« on: April 15, 2024, 03:14:33 am »
EDIT 2: On further analysis, it seems that the eccentric behavior I mentioned pertaining to the lower extremities DOES follow a trend when I compare the Difference filter to the game: as soon as a color's shifted result nears True Black (RGB 0,0,0), it locks itself to True Black for any remaining shifts downwards. What this tells me is that this probably IS a manual palette shift and not an applied filter, tint or overlay, but the logic behind the palette choices was to use the Addition/Difference method I suggested, with individual preprogrammed choices accounting for when the colors hit black and began to shift brighter again as a different hue.
Which means all of this was completely useless to me and the work I'm trying to accomplish! Yay!
Sorry to waste everyone's time, you can lock this thread if you'd like. Or leave it open in case someone is able to prove me wrong. It doesn't really matter to me now that I've hit this conclusion.
To cut to the chase, how is the gradient applied to the Dialogue Boxes in Chrono Trigger? While trying to recreate the dialogue boxes in a different engine, I realized for the first time the gradient stretches to match the height of the box, always in 16 segments regardless of the box's height. Needless to say, this greatly complicates my attempts in rebuilding the boxes accurately.
I initially assumed it was an overlay, but can't find a corresponding layer when removing layers in an emulator. Then I took a guess that it might be a simple tint of some kind, but in some cases the exchanged colors are completely inconsistent in their hue/saturation shifting, something that probably wouldn't arise from a linear tint.
I eventually arrived at the conclusion that it might be a form of visual filtering, but while I was able to flawlessly recreate all of the lighter parts of the gradient in Paint.NET by applying an Additive Blend Mode to some shades of gray and even some of the darker gradient, but the bottom two or three steps always seem to veer sharply off the palette, with no other filters really being able to make up the difference.
The only theory I have left on my own is good ol' straight-up palette shifting, but given how wildly the intervals change it doesn't quite match up with my (admittedly limited) understanding of how tiles work in SNES games at all. Aren't palettes typically locked to a specific interval of around 8x8 pixels? But then again, the actual gradient itself isn't locked to this interval either, unless there are multiple sprites for each variant but that just seems like a waste of graphical space in a way that seems too uneconomical to be practical for an SNES game.
Anyway, this confusion and inability to efficiently recreate the effect on my own is why I'm asking here, on the foremost Chrono Trigger site that I know of, how CT's internal engine operates. With any luck, I may be able to employ whatever method they use in my recreation, but to do that I'd have to know how it was done in the first place.
EDIT: Sorry, I accidentally posted this in Kajar Laboraties originally... I've since deleted the original and put it here where it felt more apt since while asking does pertain to a fan project the question itself is about the operations of the game's rom.
Which means all of this was completely useless to me and the work I'm trying to accomplish! Yay!
Sorry to waste everyone's time, you can lock this thread if you'd like. Or leave it open in case someone is able to prove me wrong. It doesn't really matter to me now that I've hit this conclusion.
I initially assumed it was an overlay, but can't find a corresponding layer when removing layers in an emulator. Then I took a guess that it might be a simple tint of some kind, but in some cases the exchanged colors are completely inconsistent in their hue/saturation shifting, something that probably wouldn't arise from a linear tint.
I eventually arrived at the conclusion that it might be a form of visual filtering, but while I was able to flawlessly recreate all of the lighter parts of the gradient in Paint.NET by applying an Additive Blend Mode to some shades of gray and even some of the darker gradient, but the bottom two or three steps always seem to veer sharply off the palette, with no other filters really being able to make up the difference.
The only theory I have left on my own is good ol' straight-up palette shifting, but given how wildly the intervals change it doesn't quite match up with my (admittedly limited) understanding of how tiles work in SNES games at all. Aren't palettes typically locked to a specific interval of around 8x8 pixels? But then again, the actual gradient itself isn't locked to this interval either, unless there are multiple sprites for each variant but that just seems like a waste of graphical space in a way that seems too uneconomical to be practical for an SNES game.
Anyway, this confusion and inability to efficiently recreate the effect on my own is why I'm asking here, on the foremost Chrono Trigger site that I know of, how CT's internal engine operates. With any luck, I may be able to employ whatever method they use in my recreation, but to do that I'd have to know how it was done in the first place.
EDIT: Sorry, I accidentally posted this in Kajar Laboraties originally... I've since deleted the original and put it here where it felt more apt since while asking does pertain to a fan project the question itself is about the operations of the game's rom.
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Welcome / Birthday / Seeya! Forum / The past is dead. It was all just a dream...
« on: April 01, 2024, 02:26:27 pm »
Howdy, folks. Name's Crazy Jane (She/Her). My hobbies include doing art and doing nothing, with an obvious trend towards the latter, and I enjoy vintage machinery, friendly cats and long walks off short piers. I dabble in several artistic mediums but don't really produce anything consistently enough to call myself a proper artist, and I've been messing around with RPG Maker recently. If I make anything good, I might post it here!
I played Chrono Trigger back in my teens a couple decades back, which inspired me to check out an old demo for a never-finished fangame called Chrono Crisis that, in a roundabout way, led me here because a couple users from the Compendium posted on that fangame's forum.
Fast forward several years later and, while looking over the ruins of that old fangame forum, I remembered the Compendium and decided to see if it was still in commission. Lo and behold, here you are and here you remain!
While I know I have an old account on here, I forgot the username, password and email and have long since moved to another state so not even my IP address would match, leaving me with nothing to make a compelling enough argument for reclaiming it. Probably for the best, I've never really had much of a presence here, if any, and I've changed a lot since back then anyway.
That all said, it's nice to see you're all still at it. Even Kajar Labs seems to have made a recovery in the wake of Crimson Echoes' Cease and Desist. Since I do have plans to do some CT-adjacent stuff with RPG Maker (not so much fangames as proof-of-concepts to experiment with the engine's Event System), would it be okay to post that in there or is that forum solely for Rom Hacking?
I played Chrono Trigger back in my teens a couple decades back, which inspired me to check out an old demo for a never-finished fangame called Chrono Crisis that, in a roundabout way, led me here because a couple users from the Compendium posted on that fangame's forum.
Fast forward several years later and, while looking over the ruins of that old fangame forum, I remembered the Compendium and decided to see if it was still in commission. Lo and behold, here you are and here you remain!
While I know I have an old account on here, I forgot the username, password and email and have long since moved to another state so not even my IP address would match, leaving me with nothing to make a compelling enough argument for reclaiming it. Probably for the best, I've never really had much of a presence here, if any, and I've changed a lot since back then anyway.
That all said, it's nice to see you're all still at it. Even Kajar Labs seems to have made a recovery in the wake of Crimson Echoes' Cease and Desist. Since I do have plans to do some CT-adjacent stuff with RPG Maker (not so much fangames as proof-of-concepts to experiment with the engine's Event System), would it be okay to post that in there or is that forum solely for Rom Hacking?
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