Editor Help: Swapping Character Models/Icons

[mrmanson6661]

Hi everyone!
**FEEL FREE TO SKIP**
So first post on this site, I grew up with the Golden Sun series while most everyone else was playing Pokémon games, own 3 hard copies each for the original GBA games (for save slots and such), and love this game more than any other. That being said I really wanted to start modifying the game as a project for a friend of mine. She's a huge Golden Sun fan and a huge fan of Attack on Titan, so I wanted to do a bit of a crossover for her. Goals for the crossover include the basic name changes (which I can do no problem), extremely basic dialogue editing to reflect gender swaps (i.e. referring to Sheba as him instead of her), and the not so basic idea of changing Garet's battle model and menu/chat icon to those of Isaac's father Kyle. I've seen videos of people using Kraden in battle, but assuming Kyle doesn't have enough animations, I'd be more than willing to settle for an icon swap between the two.
Also, for those interested: Isaac (Eren), Felix (Mikasa), Sheba (Armin), Garet (Jean)// Piers (Levi), Ivan (Petra), Jenna (Sasha), Mia (Hanji)
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Perhaps I'm missing something relatively easy here, and if there is another topic that addresses this matter I'd be happy to take a point in the right direction, but can someone on here tell me the simplest way to:

Edit Event Dialogue in TLA:
     - Change "him" to "her" or (he/she)
        for the sake of reflecting renames
        that gender swap

Swap Character Models/Icons in TLA:
     - Swap the chat box/inventory icons for Garet
        with those of Isaac's Dad Kyle (and vice versa)

     - Replace Garet's battle animations/model to be
       those of Kyle, however ridiculous the fighting
       may look


Any and all help is appreciated, if there are topics that already explain how to do these in detail that I'm missing I will happily take a link in the right direction, and if there's anything formatting or otherwise that I could do better for this site's standards please don't hesitate to call me out on it.

Thanks everyone,
-Manson

[Salanewt]

So you just want to swap sprites around, or do you have custom ones you want to use? Kraden in battle was almost entirely because the battle sprites were added to the game; the only human battle animations that are in the actual game are bosses, player characters, and the GS1 prologue versions of Isaac/Garet.

Merely swapping for other sprites would be pretty simple if you want to do that. If you go to the stat editor window and select Garet, you can click on his battle sprite to change it. I think you can only select anything that uses compression format 0 though.

Otherwise... the editor does have some basic graphic editing capabilities at least, but only for certain formats. It really depends on what you want to do with it.


Event dialogue: The editor (at least the 0.5 alpha version) has text editing capabilities that would probably let you edit dialogue without even touching events, so that should help. It would be up to you to scan thousands of text strings, but it's totally possible.

Chatbox/portraits: You can actually do that by going to the sprite viewer, selecting Garet, and then clicking on his portrait. You can only swap portraits for characters that actually have them though.

[Red Dingo]

Yeah, I just tried turning Felix and Jenna's battle sprites into Saturos and Menardi. All I saw was Jenna's staff floating in the air. I either need to find a way to reformat their compression values or hex edit the sprites over each other.

On a related note, what does the compression format value represent? Does it have a bearing on the address of sprites in the code?

[Salanewt]

Mostly the way the sprites are compressed. For example, format 0 is (I think) the lowest compression, whereas some of the others may borrow sections of various sprites in order to save space? Can't remember the specifics, but it would be more accurate to call the "compression values" in the editor format IDs.

If I recall correctly, format 0 is basically close to uncompressed with single-byte arguments that decide on the number of transparent pixels. It's a lot of work to do it manually though. On the other hand, format 2 may be the most complicated one in the sprite viewer. I think. It doesn't have anything to do with sprite addresses.

[Rolina]

Isn't the way it works that they layer the sprites to save space or something?  It also allows them to get around the color limit this way, which I think is why they do it.

[Salanewt]

I thought I made a post; not so much the palette thing, since GS handles sprites in a way where there isn't as much of an issue with that, but most likely to save space and/or for convenience.

[Atrius (He/Him)]

Yeah, I just tried turning Felix and Jenna's battle sprites into Saturos and Menardi. All I saw was Jenna's staff floating in the air. I either need to find a way to reformat their compression values or hex edit the sprites over each other.

Sprites highlighted in red in the list when you're selecting battle sprites for party members are in a compression format that will not work.

Alpha v0.5 of the editor can convert sprites to different formats.


The compression values represent the format the sprites are compressed in.  You can kind of think of the difference like the sprites being compressed in .gif, or .png format (in reality though, the games formats don't match either of those)  Format 2 is a special format only used by enemies in battle that will not work at all in many other places, including for party members in battle.

[Salanewt]

Although just to add to that, it seems like being in the NPC class can override the "no format 2 battle sprites" restriction depending on the sprite size? Small sprites will glitch out the status menu for sure, while medium may and large/giant probably also glitch.

Basically means you have to rework how the NPC class works or lose access to the class system though.

[Atrius (He/Him)]

Considering the way that compression format 2 works it would be much safer to convert the sprites to a different format than to try reworking how the NPC class works.

In format 2, ALL of the sprites in the set have to be decompressed to memory before any of them can be displayed.  In any of the other formats only the one sprite from the set being shown has to be decompressed.  Format #2 is much more memory heavy than any other format.

[Red Dingo]

I tried changing some battle sprites to Format 0 using the new editor. First try gave me this error message:


___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of Other Event: User Defined 15
for object obj_eSprites:

Error reading byte.

___________________________________________

This error kept repeating as the save progressed.

The second attempt did not give me an error message and appeared to succeed. Thing is, the format kept changing back to its previous value when I viewed another sprite and came back to the one I tried to change. Clearly the ROM's machine spirit does not like me and I don't have chocolate to appease it.

Edit: Also the Rom won't run anything other than a white screen. I think changing the compression format requires additional repointing.

[Salanewt]

Oh yeah, I forgot to consider the differences in memory usage. Atrius makes a very good point here.

Swapping sprites: Ouch, that stinks. It may be easier to just copy your desired sprites to a file or something and then edit/replace the PC sprites, rather than convert them to another format if doing so is giving you issues.

[Red Dingo]

In that case, I'd have to find the offsets of the sprites I want to replace and hex em with the values of the sprites with which I want to replace them. That means learning how to format customized sheets into gmspr files, right?


OR I could just use the feature on the new editor that loads sprites from your hard drive after a gazillion hours of editing the Proxians to separate their weapons and another gazillion hours to create weapon sprites for different groups. Learning to sprite and shade in the process...

Nother Edit: On a semi-related note: I believe the modern day sprite artist has a lot to thank the Impressionist movement for.