Sacred Blaze

Gonna slow down a bit over the next few weeks most likely, but if I do get anything done, I'll post it here, I guess. Anyway, a new town map. Looks kind of on the big side, but realistically the action on this map would be confined to the center area. Villages would be on a bandit destruction timer or something with that top right one being more difficult to prevent without a flier or a way to open the door. Got three more more portraits in as I was making this as well: An armoured fighter type guy. Found myself a bit limited on what I could do with him. Wanted him to look pretty simple, but still have some originality to him. A mage guy of some kind. Looks more sage than mage, but I guess there's not much to be done about that really. A cavalier or something. Kind of get a less noble FE4 Sigurd vibe from his look, although it wasn't intentional.

Made a new map. Imagine it as a kind of "standoff" defensive map fighting off units coming from the top-left and some circling around the bottom. Not actually so sure how to do big water areas, in terms of tiles, so please tell me if I'm doing it wrong. Also, ignore the weird looking area around the beach, it's just the particular tilesets water titles being a bit weird. Also managed to get another sprite done. Actually took a quite a bit longer than the others, despite not looking like it. I unfortunately had limited options with the hair because Cecilia's hair has four shades and I can't do custom shading that well yet. But oh well, long hair is long hair. Have the two designs with the open jacket and "closed", I guess. Think I like the open one better for now.

Those growths for Andrei aren't his ones. I have a sheet with the character growths on my first post in the hack topic, if you want to use that. I guess there are character spoilers in that case though. If not though, Andrei is Wil in Nightmare.

Yes, although to further clarify: You can't visit villages that Alyssa is in (chapter 11 and chapter 18), is in with any of the Lord characters, Ash,Val,Alicia or Andrei. To be fair, I assume on a first run, it's unlikely for people to do that in the first place and on a second run, the dialogue in the villages change - or at least they should have, which was the signal that something was up. Pretty sad that you won't have Alyssa for that run though, she really helps.

IIRC using nosferatu in scripted fights kind of breaks the game. The unit starts infinitely gaining health for a few minutes. And as was said, changing weapon effectiveness isn't hard to do, no. Thanks. Can't link you to a rom, that's not allowed here. That's not even his final form. But seriously, yeah, that's an (annoying) bug. And I'm not too familiar with the patching software on Macs, so I'm hoping that someone else can give you an answer on that. Sorry.

Thanks man, I appreciate it. Anyway, only one thing to show this time. It's not quite to a state that I can call "done" yet, but I think it's coming along OK for now. The main thing I'm struggling with at the moment is how to shade this clothing region in the center. In the second image, I've made a start but I really don't know how to proceed from there. Does anyone have any advice or know a good sprite to try and reference the shading off of? Next update after I finish this off will probably be another set of maps.

Ha, you actually finished Gheb FE? Anyway, hopefully you'll have fun with this. Is it too late to say that Gheb FE was my main inspiration for everything in this hack?

That's good to know. And yeah, I did do some testing to figure out where the thieves should escape. Originally I wanted them to go somewhere else, but it made it pretty darn difficult to get them without throwing one of your units in almost certain death. I tried it on hard mode with one of those setups and even Josie couldn't safely take care of thief and make it back. Clare getting light magic is fair point, but she doesn't really have the greatest magic stat. In fact, it's on par with Layla, based on the average stats. And with light magic being as weak as it is and Clare not really being someone who you can get a high magic level with, it seems like she needs the extra damage of anima tomes more than she needs light, to some extent. Also, Layla/Clare A support. And you're right about Ice Cage. I can't remember whether this existed in any version of the patch that I put up here, but it was originally a heavier tome with around 10 or 11 MT and more crit, I think. I think Alicia also had a higher magic growth back then though, so it literally just killed everything. Didn't really know what to do with it after that. What you're saying is a decent solution, probably. Better than what I've got, thats seems certain. However, Thunder (Burst) is already there for wyverns. And will the extra two damage (compared to Thunder) make a big difference in the long run against pegasus knights? You can get an Elfire - also 10 MT - as early as chapter 13 from Layla or the storage. Alicia probably isn't going to be doubling pegasus knights even with a low weight personal tome. I could patch it in if someone wants to have a go with it and see how it fares. And wow, that sounds bad. The Layla and Jace are something close to understandable, but Andrei's strength just sounds unacceptable. He's definitely not gonna be maxing strength this time around.

I decided to switch things up this time, so I've done some sprites. It's been a while since I've actually done any of this, so excuse me whilst I try and get back into the swing of things. As I said before, these aren't really for anything yet, so I don't really have any sort of story to go with these sprites. Most elements of the sprites are just spliced, but I'm doing my own shading in some parts to make all the parts blend together, where I can. Pretty standard splice here, I guess. I wanted her to have some sort of face paint thing going on in the one on the right, but then I found out (the hard way) that I can't really draw and shade in smaller patterns too well. So it's just the top part of her face now. I'm guessing the shading on the red cloth could use some work, as well. I feel like there's more that could be done with this one, but at the same time, I had trouble working with the robes. I think the one on the right might look a bit better, because it draws a better contrast between the collar and the robes, but I'm not sure whether that really makes a difference. I'm happy with this one, for the most part. Could use some improvements here and there, of course, but I don't think it's too bad. Quite happy with the design of this one as it is too, although I'd guess that her hair might need some shading improvements, especially around the top there. The most recent effort of this set of portraits. Took a lot of different parts from lots of different people in order to make this one work out. Tried my best to work out the shading on her hair in the back, which I think worked out for the most part. I'm thinking that the emblem on her armour might need to extend towards her left shoulder a little bit more though. And that's all for now.

Ah, cool, I figured I would miss something silly out. I'll fix those errors in a bit, with the stairs and the height inconsistency. As for the the roads stuff, yeah I think it's become a bit more acceptable to have more "full" looking roads from what I've seen, as of late. I think it depends on what the roads look like for the most part. Might still break them up on the first one though. Good to know that they look good though. EDIT: Edited pictures in the top post.

Hey there. Whilst I'm not working on anything major just right now, I don't want my skills to dwindle too much. So in the meantime I'm gonna do some stuff. It'll mostly be maps, but I might do some OK-ish sprites sometime later as well. It'll be a slow roll, but here's what I have so far: [spoiler=Maps] [spoiler=Sprites]

I think the new head here (Ephidel, right?) doesn't really fit the body that the other person made all that well. It's a little on the large side Another thing would be the cut the size of the neck so that it doesn't look so long. Anyway, I think this topic is done for now. I don't think I really need anymore edits and I don't think anyone's working on any at the moment.(?) I'm gonna ask the mods to lock it. If anyone does have something that they were working on for the last two remaining portraits, you can show me in a PM, if you want. But once again, thank you to everyone that has helped out with this whole project.

Alright then. Thanks for the feedback, either way. I did intend for the map to be a bit left heavy, but you might be right about it being too much. I figured that most people would care more about the recruitable characters, especially if you want to use Layla, as opposed to the npc prisoners. I made training Layla harder overall, largely just because on the old version, it required next to no effort. On this map though, there are still ways to go about it. One good way is to actually not bother about helping the prisoners out until you get here, because those enemies on the right aren't too bad. Yeah, go ahead. It gets easier as things go on, I'm sure anyone who's played most of it will agree with that. I hadn't made any changes for the hard mode of this part of the game - the lyn mode - though, so nobody needs to worry about that. Tbh, this beginning section of this mode is probably the hardest part of the entire game, which is why I put up the .sav to let people freely go straight to hard mode on the other mode if they want to.

That's fine. Thanks for the honest criticism. You know, I think I'm gonna start packing the game with a .sav file with hard mode unlocked, because yeah, normal mode really just doesn't quite cut it sometimes. I've noticed that myself. The main thing, as you said, is the low-stat unpromoted enemies. When I first put this up, there were even less promoted enemies and I've slowly been trying to improve on that. At the same time though, I was trying not to throw too many promoted enemies at the player because then everyone just levels up faster and then I need to keep on raising enemy stats, which is another problem in itself. The end result of that was basically what you've got now, which isn't perfect. But I'm against making large changes to the mode, just because Tbh though, going an all-female run on this hack might have actually made it slightly easier for you in this case, but that doesn't change any of the above. I don't doubt that this is true, (in fact, I know it IS true) but which supports referred to things that hadn't happened/were resolved, if you can remember? Some of them might be unintentional. As for the humour, I opted not to go for it in large parts, because - coming from me - it really wouldn't be good, trust me. The few examples of it are there in supports with Alyssa, Meredith and Laraya, I guess. With Val and her place in the ending, yeah it's not something that is directly reflected much in the events of the game, but the point of it is more that - despite Ash being the "main" character, a lot of characters join you because of Valentine and a lot of characters speak to her during maps and stuff. Also, the main countries in the land, Tiomare, Megelar (less so) and Isaac's lands owe quite a bit to her as a results of what did happen in the game. It probably could have been represented better though, as you and others have pointed out before. Some more actual dialogue related to those things would definitely help out there. That said, thanks for the write-up. I appreciate it. Also, you missed a golden opportunity in posting this on Valentine's Day, just sayin'. In other news, I've added up a list of all the talk conversations in the game to the front post. Well, actually, I did it a while back, but forgot to mention it.

I remember this issue coming up before, but I'm certain that I fixed it. When did you get the patch that you're playing through? With that patch, you'd have to skip over it, (and the short bit of dialogue that's there) because it's trying to move someone on the map who isn't there.

Never have I ever seen so many 6-7 stat procs for levels in one chapter. Marco has the second lowest speed growth in the game and he's getting speed levels like they're nothing, meanwhile your Val earlier couldn't get it at all, despite being like 3rd or 4th from the top. JustRNGThings

Send it to me in a PM. Have you got dropbox or something like that? Anything that can get it through to me over a public link should work.

Yeah, it's basically just Danielle at this point, I guess. I don't have anything I would particularly need to be done to other characters at this point, I think, so it would basically be your call. What's the plan with Pamela?

Hmm, ok. Would you be able to give me a copy of your .sav file and/or a save state file sometime before things are freezing up? It might be easier to figure out exactly what is going wrong from there. Also, do you know what date you got the patch before the one that you just used? Sorry about the inconvenience, btw.

Following in from Aviv's edit on Val's noble outfit, I've just tried to touch things up a bit. I think the main issue I had before was that the shoulders were going heading off at different angles from each other. This looks better to me, but I don't know. What do others think? Anyway, just for my own peace of mind, is anyone planning on working on any portraits right now, or soon? I know some people had plans to do stuff with other characters, so I just want to know if that's still happening, or whether it's becoming time to wrap up this topic. There's basically only one portrait left that hasn't been edited properly, the woman in the light blue colour under the Done Mugs section on the first page. (Danielle) I just changed her colour scheme and made some minor touch-ups, so she's free for whatever anyone else might want to do with her.

Oscar = Isaac? Or is that Kane? Anyway, thanks for playing guys. And on all this class stuff: I like Druids :/ That's pretty much all I have to say about the look, lol. The look seems to be mostly opinion based, but I know I'm not the only one. Alicia gets dark magic on promotion though, that is her difference from the other sages. Rayden = Anima/Light/Staff, Alicia = Anima/Dark, Layla = Anima/Staves. The three sages also have some slightly different caps even though it doesn't mean much seeing as 20/20 on several units isn't really normal. Or are we talking only about having different names? Anyway, for a lot of reasons, I probably wouldn't give Ash light magic. I'd have to make some plot alterations for one thing. The extra crit doesn't really seem like it'd work well either. Mainly because a lot of enemies don't have the greatest resistance. There'd be almost nothing he wouldn't kill which would make him somewhat OP. A comparison for this is Berserker Hawke, but he doesn't have good hit rates, especially against sword users and he gets destroyed by enemy attacks. (especially magic stuff) Meanwhile, Ash doesn't really have weapon triangle disadvantages for most of the game, and his defenses and hp are decent enough. Not only that, but unless I got rid of Luna and the Light magic spells crit bonuses, things might get out of hand, imo.

That was what the patch I uploaded before was supposed to fix. Last I checked it doesn't bug out. I'll upload a new one. Tell me if it works or not. Are you just getting the black screen? Or is it a different kind of crash?

Updates on Dante and Laraya. That hair detail though.

Nice, always cool to see other people's characters. Yeah, that's because Kenrick and Emilia take up Pent and Louise's slots, respectively. They're restricted to B supports in FE7, other than with each other, so it just greys them out on that screen.

I was actually talking about someone else in this case. But I forgot that DH_Ninja also said that. Yeah, a little bit. Shoulders look better too, but they might still need more work than that. The bottom part of her body can't just be cut off though, otherwise she'll be noticeably short in-game.