Another (probably dumb) Temporal Flux question

[TheMage]

Well its not so much with temporal flux as it is tile molester. I've sucessfully been able to replace the status menu portraits (yey) but i have no clue how to change a characters sprites I mean, I've read the tutorial here: http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Editing_character_or_enemy_graphics.html

and I have the sprite graphics offsets spreadsheet and found the sprites I wanted to edit easily:



I even have her pallette but I dont know how I would actually throw in an edited version in. Like say if I wanted to replace her with Schala or Gina or I dunno.  I think I can only do 15 colors and I know one of them is transparent and i'm not quite sure what the canvas size is supposed to be so I left it at 16 by 16. Do I rip Marle out of  the rom edit it then make sure its fifteen colors match the colors with snes pal and throw her back in by pasteing the image?

Anyway if someone has answers or a link to a tutorial- thanks!

[FaustWolf]

All sprites are 12 colors to my knowledge. You're in for a fun time, because you'll need to learn a bit of sprite assembly. However, it's probably possible to carefully place the new character's subtiles such that the old character's sprite assembly will work for you.

I think this thread provides a fairly comprehensive overview of sprite assembly. Man, I want to write a guide that details sprite animation, but I won't get to it for awhile. Vehek or justin3009 probably have info on that lying around somewhere though.

As far as insertion, it's literally as easy as copying and pasting from a source image to the ROM and then taking care of the palette, but you'll have to use Temporal Flux to compress the graphics if you're editing NPC or enemy sprites.

[TheMage]

Thanks for the link that helped a lot, I think i'll get the hang of this!

 12 colors- good to know glad that at least the insertion will be  easy-ish.

[justin3009]

If you want to replace them image by image, just use the Paste To command in Tile Molester to export a whole page of sprites, aka what you see there.  Then replace them with whomever and place them back in.  If you want to implement Schala, good luck.  She needs a LOT of Sprite Assembly work.

[TheMage]

Yeah I don't think I'll implement schala for awhile, but thanks for the info!

Maybe  i'll just mess with NPC sprites....speaking of NPC sprites- I give! I can't find them in tile molester- well I can I know where to find them- but I cant make them look in any way shape or form almost normal. . .does that have to do with the compression I have to do in TF or the canvas size or....I dunno lol.

[justin3009]

They're compressed.  You have to decompress them using Temporal Flux.

Steps
===========
Click 'File'
Click 'Compression'
Type in the Address of the NPC graphics, EX: "13EEB0   13F049   GFX   Y   (BD) NPC and Enemy Graphics   2003.07.07 - Norstein bekkler"
Type in 13EEB0.
Then click '...' 
Make a copy of ANY rom and then select it.
Click Decompress
Open up the file that you chose to decompress to in Tile Molester and you're done.

[TheMage]

Thank you so much!

[TheMage]

Yey it worked! Thank you both for the help. The only bug is that any room Belthasar is in wont load and I get the black screen of death, the rub is I edited Crono's mom's graphics, not his at all.  Any insight?

[justin3009]

Did you recompress the graphics?  If so, it probably overwrote something it shouldn't have maybe.

[TheMage]

I think so, after I saved the changes in Tile Molester I went to file, compression then clicked the ... button, clicked the copied file where I had saved the decompressed edited sprites typed in the address and hit compress- thats what I was supposed to do right?  I edited the Ioka females- they didn't seem to effect any other sprites. Hmm.

[FaustWolf]

When inserting sprites, take note of the graphics pack addresses and sizes listed in the offsets spreadsheet -- I think you've been using it already. Temporal Flux will give you a report of the newly-compressed graphics pack's starting and ending addresses. If the ending location indicates a size greater than the size listed in the spreadsheet, there's bound to be trouble. That trouble can be avoided of course -- through repointering, which in turn will require some adjustment of the following graphics pack that the original sprite insertion just partially overwrote.

[TheMage]

Ahh alright, I see what I did wrong. Thanks, I think i've been typing in the wrong adress I used the same adress as I did for the decompression.

[FaustWolf]

I think that should be right, actually, though I may be misunderstanding what you're doing. The re-insertion address should be the same as address you extracted from. It's the ending address that you typically need to be most worried about.

[TheMage]

hmm Well i'll tell you exactly what I did:

I have the chrono trigger unheadered sprites info that I got off the main page which is totally awesome except previous to two days ago I had no idea what any of it meant...heh.

So I changed Crono's mom's graphics a tiny bit, she was listed under 36 GFX Pack Pointer Index and I typed in 19D2BC  this was listed under Sprite packet Starting adress (Hex) so I typed that in when it asked for the address and then I decompressed it and when I  compressed her back in I did the same exact address- 19D2BC I know I did something wrong because well I dont know what an ending address is or where to find it so thats probably my problem.

I guess u could say I'm a total noob when it comes to this I've shyed away from temporal flux and all things related (save downloading demos of Crimson echoes chrono trigger + etc) all together until this year.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the help!

[justin3009]

The ending address is listed at the bottom of Temporal Flux when you decompress or recompress something.  Just take a look when you do it.