23 replies to this topic

[CrypticGirl]

I'm back, making more edits to my project. This time I'm taking inspiration from the new thumbnails I have seen in different hacks, and thought to make better thumbnails for my Tales patch. So I saved the files from FE Editor Adv, edited them in Photoshop, and then loaded them back into the editor. And strangely, only half of them worked. Some of them won't load at all. No error messages or anything. I even tried inserting them into a clean ROM, and still nothing. The ones that didn't work were as follows...

Will
Chloe
Natalia
Kratos
Arche
Tear
Judas
Maurits
Moses
Grune
Luke
Mint
Colette
Dist
Sync
Van
Cashel
Melanie
Solon
Stella
Remiel
Martel

[SmashedFish]

Alright, I've got a few questions, and then we should hopefully be able to set you back on track. First off, what do you mean by thumbnails? Also, can you link the image files that aren't working, so I can take a look myself? Just giving us names doesn't help too much.

Edit: I think I figured out what you mean by thumbnails. Would that be full-sized portraits, like my avatar, or chibis, the mini faces that show up when you have your cursor over one of your units?

[CrypticGirl]

Yeah, the chibi things are what I was talking about. Here are some game shots, showing Judas with the old chibi, and Senel with the new, so you can see what I'm trying to do.







And here's the image file for Judas I've edited from FE Editor Adv.

[Whitewolf8]

It has 17 colours, you'll need to remove a colour~

[SmashedFish]

Haha, I suspected that was the case. Yeah, go through each image and see if you can take colors out to reduce them to 16, and try again.

[Fire Blazer]

Things to check when inserting portraits

- dimensions (if you exported it first and didn't edit them they should be fine, IIRC it's 128x112 though don't take my word for it)
- colors (16 colors including background, Usenti helps a lot here)
- portrait box (make sure the actual graphics fit in the specified areas, i.e. if you use an area outside what the game is coded to use, it won't show up, and there IS some blank space like that in the formatted image, so yeah...)

[CrypticGirl]

Okay, that seems to have worked for the most part. I realized that the border of the chibi didn't match the outline of the face sprites themselves, so that's where the 17th color came from.

Now I have another problem. Some of the portraits suffered an...unfortunate side effect when loaded back into the game.



One thing I noticed was that the transparent color was the whitest color (meaning RGB values of 255). I tried changing those values to 248, thinking that it had to be in multiples of 8, but that didn't work. Could it also have to do with how many colors are in the portrait? Like was the white color just discarded to add the new color that came with the chibi border? (That still doesn't make sense to me either...)

And yet a few of the portraits with the whitest color (like Senel and Thyra) were loaded in without that little effect. Was it because they had fewer than the standard 16 colors?

[Mercurius]

My guess is:

The transparent color is the same as the face color.

Even if you have blue skin, if the background is the same blue, it will still be transparent.

The portrait needs to be 15 colors, the 16th color is always the background.

Oh wait, loaded back? Like, you dumped it, edited it, then put it back? I think the issue then is that you aren't using a program that supports transparency which made it assume white as the background color (like MSpaint) and in that case you'll have to manually fill in the background color again with whatever it originally was.

[CrypticGirl]

QUOTE (Hatless @ Mar 1 2013, 10:00 AM)

My guess is: The transparent color is the same as the face color. Even if you have blue skin, if the background is the same blue, it will still be transparent. The portrait needs to be 15 colors, the 16th color is always the background. Oh wait, loaded back? Like, you dumped it, edited it, then put it back? I think the issue then is that you aren't using a program that supports transparency which made it assume white as the background color (like MSpaint) and in that case you'll have to manually fill in the background color again with whatever it originally was.

Exactly, the portraits were dumped from my old Tales hack ROM. I didn't edit any of the colors, and the white colors were just fine before putting the portraits back in.

So Adobe Photoshop CS2 doesn't support transparency? I thought it did... But then again, if it didn't support transparency, wouldn't all of the portraits suffer from that problem?

[SmashedFish]

Long story short, I'm lost. Just upload your images somewhere, PM them to me, and I'll fix them or post them here if I can't.

[boney]

lol why would you replace the minimugs with those boxed in versions of the full mugs?

People only do that because they're too lazy to make actual minimugs

can I have a download link so I can play Tales FE before you have this overhaul?

[CrypticGirl]

QUOTE (Boney99 @ Mar 1 2013, 01:16 PM)

lol why would you replace the minimugs with those boxed in versions of the full mugs? People only do that because they're too lazy to make actual minimugs can I have a download link so I can play Tales FE before you have this overhaul?

Because the ones I have now are crappy, and I lack the artistic talent to make actual minimugs. And this seemed like a simple enough alternative.

But here's the link to the patch if you want it. Tales patch download.

[Fire Blazer]

QUOTE

My guess is: The transparent color is the same as the face color.

This

not sure exactly what caused it but it's almost definitely this

If you set the background to white at some point it may have confused the skin tone (which is often very close to white) with the background or something. Try making the background some obscure color that won't be used and checking to make sure it's 16 colors still (if not reduce it by one color) and re-insert.

Hatless pretty much said it all

[CrypticGirl]

I'm not sure how that would've happened, because I most certainly did not have white as my background color when I originally inserted the portraits. So, how do I see what color the background is, since it's invisible in the dumped portraits?

And then I ran into yet another problem. Inserting the portraits has also messed up the battle animations. It either freezes at the battle screen altogether, or the sprites will do some funky animation first.

[Mercurius]

Photoshop CS2 does in fact support transparency, but if it isn't working now, it may be because the "transparency" is being interpreted as the skin color by FEditor (I had this issue while trying to fix a battle animation from its dumped frames before.) I recall designing my formatted mugs to have opaque backgrounds in the first place, so FEditor probably has some issue with transparency when inserting (It's either that or I did it to make editing it in other programs easier but I don't remember the true reason really)

The only fix I can think of, would be just manually recoloring the background. I usually use Blue at its most extreme (255) but that's mostly because I rarely use blue around that color, maybe something like extreme magenta would be preferable for someone else or something. In any case, white backgrounds are usually undesirable.

I have no idea how that battle animation problem of yours came up, though.

[CrypticGirl]

Well, recoloring the background seems to have worked for Anise. Now I'm gonna have a hard time deciding which of the portrait colors to remove for each character. A lot of them are going to look really bad without the shading. )X

I think I do have an idea of what caused the battle animation glitches. I'm thinking that now the portrait data overlaps with the battle sprite data. Maybe because of dimensions? Although I did dump a portrait from The Last Promise hack, and use one of the character's minimugs as the guide to get the dimensions right. Obviously the process was no so simple as it seemed.

Correct me if I'm wrong?

[Mercurius]

As far as I know battle sprites have nothing whatsoever to do with portrait data, if they do look funky for some reason without editing the sprites themselves my guess would be that something about their palette choice is weird.

[Fire Blazer]

Yeah seems like Hatless has the right ideas XP

@Cryptic

this program "Usenti" can find and locate colors that are really similar and remove them. in the case that you have 17 legitimately different colors, THEN it might have to take out an actual needed color to reduce them, but otherwise it shouldn't. Usenti can be found on google (or probably FES as well), you pretty much just download the program, extract it, open it up, open the image (though IIRC it doesn't support a certain image type... PNG's should work fine though), and then on the right it'll show all the colors in the image. 1 row of colors = 16 colors, so if it has more than a row, it's a problem. you can either manually edit two of the colors to be the same or you can use the palette-> requantize feature somewhere in the menus and forcibly make it auto-recolor the image so that it has 16 colors. If you didn't already know this, hopefully it'll help you there.

You can also use the eyedropper on say, the background and the face to check if the colors used are the same (if they are, there'll only be one color in the palette box on the right for the both of them). In this case, you need to manually recolor one or the other so that it uses a different color.

[CrypticGirl]

Okay, I'll try Usenti and see what it does.

As for the battle sprites, I'm not sure why their palettes would suddenly become a problem only after reinserting the portraits when they had worked just fine beforehand.

[Fire Blazer]

Yeah, they aren't exactly related, it kind of suggests you accidentally did something to them without even having any idea... XP