Character Graphics Swap hack.

[Mauron]

Some of the animations are designed to line up. Standard battle pose, attack, and casting work nicely, but Cylcone's particular animation doesn't match with anything of Ayla's. A new sprite could have its data set up to match properly.

[IHBP]

Ya that makes sense, not really an issue starting from scratch though.

[Rjenyawd]

THAT could be a problem with Frog's sprite swap to a human spritsheet.  Frog is a shorter character that uses less pixel block segments than a full sized human sprite like Chrono or Lucca. ...So animation assembly could be broken for a swap to a taller sprite.

[IHBP]

I'd just start with a bigger sprite as the base, probably Crono's. Then just edit the animations in High-Tech

[Mauron]

All PCs are size 0 sprites, which consist of 4 16x16 blocks. You'd have to change the sprite assembly, but the animation order might still work.

[IHBP]

Well that's a relief, so is this still a possibility?

[Mauron]

Yeah. I'll make more progress on it... eventually.

[IHBP]

Not sure what methods you're using to do this but I was wondering...

Since each character is made up of three parts Graphics packet, Animation, and Palette, (Sprite size is irrelevant here) couldn't you just tie those to an address in the 7E28XX range like you did with the run speed value? Then a simple ingame event could set those addresses to new values.

[Mauron]

There's also sprite assembly.

Potentially this could be done by storing 4 bytes per character to RAM, but it would require less space to have a single swap byte and a second table.

[IHBP]

Space is not really an issue, I haven't checked in a while but I think I have something like 200 addresses left.
Plus for the moment I'm mostly interested in one character.

Would this method actually be any faster or easier?

[Mauron]

I can do a quick glance at the idea. Some of the harder parts are hard either way, but it might be faster in some ways.

[IHBP]

Hopefully it yields something good.

[IHBP]

This idea is probably a longshot but that's usually where obsessions take you eventually.

I was playing around with the newest Warrior Workshop's character graphics editor and noticed that the changes you make work perfectly on the field but they are reverted in the Character Swap menu.

This tells me that the game already stores two sets of character data, if we adjust the pointer so the field and character menu share the same data we could store a second appearance for each character in the second set.

It would still require an ingame routine to swap them but it might work?

[Mauron]

The game ignores certain data at various points, unfortunately. A few parts of the code ignore the sprite data for PCs and assumes the correct value is equal to the character index.

I added that data for... some reason in future support of other plugins.

[IHBP]

So I discovered yesterday that the character portraits are loaded from ram, which means I can change them in game with a single command.  This is good since any alternate appearances would need a new portrait,  what I need to know is what does it take to expand the portrait index and add new entries with custom graphics?