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Hey all, again! I have just completed a new sprite set for a character and tried it out. Outside of battle (world map, towns, ect), it works great. In a battle, however, the palette seems to be completely different. I created this sprite-set as a replacement of one of the main characters (Setzer, specifically) and used the same palette as normally used (number 4). I'm using Lord Js Sprite Editor.

It seems odd to me that this would happen, since I didn't change the palette to use.

Thanks.

The only thing I can think of, assuming you didn't change the palette numbers and it looks fine outside of battle, is that you used the last 4 colors in the palette. These colors are used for NPCs and such and look absolutely fine on the world map, but mess up in battle. I'd stay away from those and stick with the other 11 colors.

If that's not the problem, then I don't know what to tell you.

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Is PJ

Yeah, the last 4 colors get axed in favor of various things. Not quite sure what, though. I think it has to do with status effect sprites. Anyhow.

I ran into that problem too once. I had carefully planned custom palettes for my characters, had everything going my way just fine, then... one of the sprites had a green face in battle. Took me quite a while to realize what was going on.

Turns out, when you've carefully planned your colors and need to axe out 1/4th of them per palette, you're about screwed.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Yeah, that seems to be the problem. Unfortunately, I'll have to create my own custom palette in order to avoid the last four of any one palette.

Are there any unused palettes? That is, are there any palettes that I could customize and use without impacting anything else in the game?

Again, I'm using Lord Js Sprite Editor, as well as his multi-editor. I also have the editor from Yousei.

Thanks a bundle!

The Terra Esper/Umaro/Mog palette can probably be scrapped. It's one of the least-commonly used palettes. As for unused palettes, tough luck. You could probably create your own palettes but properly pointing to them is definately beyond the scope of an editor.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Okay, here's a plan. Let me know if it will work, and if so, how might I go about doing it?

The palettes used for Terras esper form (battle #6 and overworld #8) seem to only be used for that single sprite (Terra esper). So how about I switch the palette for Terra esper to something else, say #5 (which just results in a grey-colored esper) and then customize the formerly used palettes to my liking?

Also, it seems that the actual palette used for any given sprite doesn't seem changable with Lord Js editor. It looks like one can only preview a sprite with a palette, but can't permanently change it. Am I missing something?

Otherwise, it looks like I could customize the palettes with Lord Js multi-editor.

So the only mystery now is how to change the palette used with a sprite set.

Thanks.

Well, you could get your hands dirty with some sweet, sweet hex. FF6's an easy ROM to work your magic on. Changing palettes would be a pretty good place to start for your first time.

Suggestive references to sexual intercourse and virginity not intentional.

However there's a problem: that just works for battle palettes. There's no such thing as a map palette anywhere in the ROM save for various places tucked in the event script. THAT'S a bit more of a handfull. You might have to content yourself with using an editor for a little longer...

Exactly what are you trying to do? If it's a complete remake of the sprites, something can be worked out. Otherwise it'll take some heavy editing to get things to work because event scripts set the palette for character sprites, and when they're just walking around on the map yet another part of the ROM does that (NPC data.)

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

The bottom line is: I'm creating a new character to replace an existing one.

So far I've editing the sprite set. That was easy; it just took some artistic effort and time. However, during that time I wasn't aware that the last four of the sixteen colors in a palette were essentially unusable (without nasty graphic effects during battles).

So my goal is this: make certain characters use different (already existing palettes) and customize a certain couple palettes to my liking. The second of these seems straight-forward (Lord Js multi-editor seems capable of this). However, changing what palette(s) a character uses doesn't seem so obvious.

I would be content with just being able to change what palette a character uses in battle, since you make it sound like the choice of palette used outside of battle is relatively complex.

Oh, and I am well-versed in using hex editors. My hex-hymen was breached a long time ago when I started messing around with save-states ^_^.

Quote (akrasia @ 5th March 2006 22:59)

Oh, and I am well-versed in using hex editors. My hex-hymen was breached a long time ago when I started messing around with save-states .

Nice, nice... fresh meat is good, but someone who won't scratch their heads trying to figure out how 0xA0 can equate 160 or why "0x01" is Locke's sprite ("NUMBERS CAN REPRESENT SPRITES? Pure folly, mate! Pure. Folly.") is even better.

In that case...

0x2D02B (or C2:CE2B if you use SNES addressing) is the location where battle palette indexes are stored. It's really easy to edit: each byte is a palette. The first one is Terra, then Locke, then Cyan... (in other words, they're in the same order as in the average sprite editor.) So normally you'd see...

02 01 04 04 00 00 00 03 03 04...

Terra uses battle palette 2, Locke uses 1, Cyan and Edgar use 4, etc.. Pretty simple, really. Just make sure you back up your project before making the changes; you'll hate yourself if you accidently edit the wrong thing and forget how to undo your changes. Trust me.

Unfortunately, nobody could figure out how this worked for map sprites. You can set Terra's battle palette index to 4 but she'll still have 2 out of battle. Eventually, Imzo (a fellow ROM hacker) and I were getting ourselves involved in events: him in decoding unknown commands, and myself in experimenting with them and seeing what could be done. I'm not quite sure how it was discovered in the first place, but it turns out there's a command used to set the palette, name, stats, and sprite of a character when they join your party. That's where the map palette is set: when the character joins, as part of an event.

That brought the map palette index search to an end and revealed how painfully difficult palettes could be to work with. To boot, NPC data (I believe the aforementionned Imzogelmo was responsible for finding most of the information on NPC sprites) holds an actual palette index, so even if you change every bit of event code where a character joins to set your new palette, there might still be some instances where their old palette will appear. Luckily, this happens very rarely, so the only real challenge is editing the events.

Which character are you replacing? I'll pull a few addresses you can take a look at if you want to make the sprite work out of battle as well.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."