Graphics Hacking

[Darkken]

Thanks for the comments.

I'm attaching the frames for King Zeal and the shell.  I've also reduced the colors to 12 so hopefully that will be easier to implement than having the eye as part of the background.

I'm going to try to work on the mech warrior again next.

[Chrono'99]

Thanks! I don't know if you saw it, but we might be able to implement human Glenn in the game (topic). Glenn has always been in a sort of big limbo in this project, though currently there are high chances that he'll be implemented successfully after all. So would you have time to make a human Glenn portrait? I hope you don't see the Frog portrait as being "wasted"; it is still possible that we don't manage to insert human Glenn in time for the release, in which case we would keep Frog and use his portrait in the game.

[Agent 12]

Hey Darkken

 I know you're like super busy but I was wondering if you still plan on doing that awesome looking mech krawlie. 

It'd be an absolutely perfect practice for me to test out my sprite assembly editor.


--JP

[Darkken]

'99: Having Glenn in would be great, so if his implementation comes to fruition I'd have no problem making a portrait for him.  I'm going to hold off doing so for now, and once there's some more progress, I'll get on it.

JP: Yep, I'm planning on working on the mech warrior next.  I had originally planned on making the frames in a way that sync'ed with Krawlie's animations... and in that case insertion would be a swap of the tiles and there wouldn't be a need to use your editor (as you hadn't programmed it yet at the time).  I've only taken a quick look at your editor; can I now make animations without worrying about matching them to Krawlie?

[FaustWolf]

What would make things easiest at this point, Darkken, would probably be to still make the Mech Warrior sprite the same size (as in "number of tiles") as the Krawlie sprite, and the same number of frames for each animation that Krawlie has. There is no hard-and-fast limit -- it's perfectly possible to have a Mech Warrior with a gazillion animation frames -- it's just that if the number of frames Krawlie has is less than the number of frames Mech Warrior has, the CE team will have to make room for Mech Warrior's sprite assembly and animation data.

In other words, let's say Krawlie's animation set consists of three frames for walking and six frames for his "grab-an-enemy-and-pound-them-around" attack. That means it would be easiest if Mech Warrior had three frames for walking and some attack that uses six frames.

Again, I'm not that familiar with how much free space the CE team has in their latest build for sprite data, so I'm not sure what their maximum limitations are.

[Agent 12]

Yea definitely make it fit in with the old place.  And if you can sync up the tiles that's a huge plus.  If the tiles can't sync up (say you need the arm to move over a little bit) we should hopefully be able to fix that.  I remember I tried doing it before and his tiles are like a huge mess.

--JP

[FaustWolf]

Tiles shouldn't need to sync up; new tile arrangements for each frame should be a snap with JP's new sprite tile assembler, because the amount of data doesn't change with tile arrangement. What matters most is that the number of tiles and the number of frames per animation is kept the same as Krawlie's.

[Chrono'99]

I'm currently testing the insertion of King Zeal. Does anyone know what's the value to put in the sprite data to have a Size 4 sprite? If I just put 04 the game takes it as a Size 0 sprite for some reason.

[FaustWolf]

How many tiles do you need for King Zeal, '99?

[Chrono'99]

He fits in 18 big tiles:

[FaustWolf]

Yeah, it should definitely be a Size 4 sprite then. The value should be 0x04. I wonder if the problem isn't that there's a weird tile pattern in the tile assembly data. For example, for a Size 1 sprite (5~8 tiles), I had to widen the rows in my hex editor to 32 bytes to get everything aligning correctly (or at least more easily understandable). I hope you don't have to keep widening it for every extra additional sprite size unit! As an example of what I'm talking about, seethe sprite insertion thread from this post until the end of that page.

I haven't worked with sprites greater than Size 1, so I'm not sure if you have to keep widening the rows in a hex editor to keep the tiles contiguous in the data or not. Reviewing Vehek's notes quoted in that thread, I think that might just be the case, but I'll have to let justin3009 or Vehek comment on this possibility. justin reported working with really large sprites IIRC.

Otherwise, you're sure you're editing the sprite data for the correct Enemy? I wonder if the sprite data order is actually different for enemies than for NPCs and PCs?

[justin3009]

I think it was Size 4 and it was 80 Bytes per animation frame I think.

[Vehek]

The problem is that's there no size 4 sprite assembly.

Code: [Select]

$C0/B703 BD 01 12    LDA $1201,x
$C0/B706 29 03       AND #$03I'm not sure if there's even a size 3 sprite assembly.

Edit: In size 2, it seems to go back to: Upper part of first 4 big tiles, lower part of first 4 big tiles, upper part of second 4 big tiles, etc.

[justin3009]

Hm..I don't think Size 1 would work for how large he is.  Unless you want to pull the trick I did for Schala by making her an enemy but already dead and stays in battle.  You could do that to Zeal and have the left overs that don't fit be in another enemy slot but not selectable at all.

[Agent 12]

We do a similar trick with the vision serpant.  But all the "Animation Tiles" would have to fit in one sprite.  We may have to lose the arms moving if this is the case?

--JP