The Glenn Thread

[Chrono'99]

Yeah Justin made OW frames back then. I think Jsondag has backups for the deleted attachments.

[FaustWolf]

Ahh, that's why I didn't see them. Very good.

[Agent 12]

Dear FW,

You can thank me later

I give you Sprite Assembly Editor V 0.8.

Here's the rundown:

All "external" files are stored in a folder called deploy in the executable directory.  All the sprite assembly info is loaded from a file called SpriteAssemblyInfo.txt.  Here's an example one:

#NPCPrettyName,AssemblyPointerAddress (NOT YET IMPLEMENTED),DataStart,DataLength,pathtospritesheet
Crono,242300,1C27B0,26C0,deploy\cronospritesheet.png
Frog,24230C,1C7490,2648,deploy\cronospritesheet.png

Most of that came straight from FW's awesome excel sheet.  You can also optionally have a file called SpriteAnimations.txt which gives human readable names to animations like "facing down".

OK, now that you have that set up let's take it for a spin:

1) Start executable
2) Load Rom
3) Select NPC.  This list is from SpriteAssemblyInfo.txt
4) The Tilesheet should appear...note this needs to be in a pretty specific form in this version. It needs to be 0xF tiles across and each tiles has to be 32 by 32 pixels. 
5) You can now make a "selected" tile by clicking on the tilesheet.
    a) Note that now is when you want to select mirror and whatever the hell section is.
6) OK, time to place the tile first select the "super tiile" which is what i called the group of 4 subtiles.  You can iterate through by pressing the next/prev buttons (or ctrl + shift + left/right)
7) Once you got the super tile selected you can place the tile with the corresponding buttons (or keyboard shortcuts).
Finally you can move the super tile wherever you want with the buttons (or ctrl + UP/Down/Left/Right).
9) finally, save your work.

It took me about .....20 seconds to make crono a hairy monster.  That being said do NOT use this on a rom that you care about.....i seriously just finished working on it and am too tired to test.

Tomorrow i'll try to implement zoom...right now I made the preview real size because i was getting some overlapping bugs when I tried to make the tiles bigger.


--JP

[justin3009]

The editor doesn't work for me at all.  You can load it up, but try to open a rom and it freaks out and crashes.

[Agent 12]

I just checked it on another machine and it worked fine......

make sure you keep the deploy folder in the same folder as the executable..

Also.....when you load the ROM? That code is very simple it's much more likely to crash when you select an NPC or frame?

--JP

[justin3009]

Right when I load the rom it says something about an Exception error.  And the deploy folder is definitely in the same folder as the executable.

Erg...It works when I select the frames and stuff but when you load the rom it'll error then continue strangely.

[Chrono'99]

I get this when I load the ROM:

************** Exception Text **************
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at System.Drawing.Bitmap..ctor(Image original)
   at CTSpriteAssemblyEditor.Form1.cropImage(Image img, Rectangle cropArea) in C:\Users\jpsondag\Documents\CodingProjects\CTSpriteAssemblyEditor\CTSpriteAssemblyEditor\Form1.cs:line 640
   at CTSpriteAssemblyEditor.Form1.NewTileSelected(Object sender, MouseEventArgs e) in C:\Users\jpsondag\Documents\CodingProjects\CTSpriteAssemblyEditor\CTSpriteAssemblyEditor\Form1.cs:line 623
   at CTSpriteAssemblyEditor.Form1.NewTileSelectedUp(Object sender, MouseEventArgs e) in C:\Users\jpsondag\Documents\CodingProjects\CTSpriteAssemblyEditor\CTSpriteAssemblyEditor\Form1.cs:line 630
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

[FaustWolf]

JP, I *think* I've got it working and I'm literally salivating to try this. I take it (from the fact that you whipped this awesome thing up in ~24 hours) that it's not fully functional yet? Seems to be displaying Crono's graphics even when I select Frog from the sprite menu. Ooh, and you got palettes to load too! At least for Crono so far.

justin, this is a long shot, but did you manually select the files when you extracted from the ZIP or did you do a straight extract without selecting anything? Sometimes that screws with the folder structure. Also, I'm loading my test ROM from the Debug folder and it isn't giving me any error messages like the one '99 posted.

Is it possible the user needs a specific version of a related Windows program?

Also, just to be sure, justin and '99, you are loading unheadered ROMs, right?

EDIT: Provided others can get it working, this is the wave of the future for graphics insertion! I love the simple point-and-click interface.

[Agent 12]

In SpriteAssemblyInfo.txt when you specify the sprite sheet for each character ( I currently have crono for both of them because I didn't have a frog sheet handy) but you can load up a new sprite sheet w/o me releasing a new version of the program.  THe downside of this is it's not loading from the ROM obviously.

Hm......chrono'99 and Justin maybe I do load the sprite sheet when I load the rom (from the 99's stack trace I might be).

If you are going to use all the defaults you have to have this directory structure because the defaults assume a deploy folder is in the executables directory


SpriteAssembly.exe
DeployFolder
           SpriteAssemblyInfo.txt
           AnimationNames.txt (i this name might be wrong)
          cronospritesheet.png      (this is referenced in SPriteAssemblyInfo.txt)


You can move cronospritesheet.png somewhere else but you'll have to change SpriteAssemblyInfo.txt.  This is most definitely not the final version so I'll make it more user friendly later.

EDIT:

Incase it's not clear from above this is not loading the spritesheet from the rom it's loading it from a file on your computer.  I tried awhile back to load it from the rom and made some progress but it's definitely not a "we need a program now to do glenn" scenario.  Also, if you can run TF and the tech editor you have the programs you need to run this program (just need .Net).
--JP

[justin3009]

Yea, I got it working now but I still get the exception error when loading the rom.  Not a big deal.

[Chrono'99]

Yea, I got it working now but I still get the exception error when loading the rom.  Not a big deal.

Same here. I had to put the ROM in the Debug folder.

[Agent 12]

hm....you still regularly get the exception.  If you find a way to make it not appear and you know what you changed please let me know.

Man c# is awesome ( it catches the exception for you haha .....amazing).  I'll try out some more test cases tonight, like I mentioned above I didn't really have time to do hardcore testing I just used the defaults.  I definitely was loading the rom from a "scratch" folder I have though so that's kind of strange. 

Anyways if someone can rip all the sprites in the same form as the cronospritesheet.png (15 tiles accross each tile 32 pixels) I'll add that in tonight and I'll try to make the animations drop down be a little more friendly.  It can atleast have animations that everryone shares (for example 03-battlestance......1A-laugh).




--JP

[justin3009]

Here's all the sprite sheets.

[Agent 12]

oo very cool.  You should be able to test it out on your end by combining the data in FW's excel sheet and just pointing it to these sheets.  Are they 32 pixels per tile  (if not it's no big deal I'll resize them tonight).

THis is exciting!

--JP

[Chrono'99]

So, not counting the frames where Frog sticks out his tongue, there are 220 sprite frames in total. I finished 3 more frames (at the right of his dead frames), and to make assembling easier I highlighted the frames that don't fit in a simple square pixel box (but do fit in Size 0 regardless).