Adding a Character to GBA games?

[Talesoffan]

Hi guys,

What I want to do is add Charlotte from Fates into these games. Since she's my fave and it could be fun. I already have an experienced spriter friend helping me out, but I'm wondering about how complicated the process is. The giant tutorial is kinda daunting to me, and what I want to do, ideally, is add Charlotte as her own character, maybe write her level up stuff, maybe add some supports? I can replace an existing character if needed as well. If that's too complicated, I could also just replace an existing character with her appearance I guess?

Also, what is the limit for battle animation frames?

Edited March 4, 2016 by Talesoffan

[Squidorsky]

Its not that hard to do this, but it does take some time. Essentially you need FEditor to insert most of the graphical things/ change text (like for her name and supports) and Nightmare to change starting stats and growth rates. Just approach it one at a time, don't instantly take everything on at once, just do one thing at a time. The ultimate tutorial is a lot to process if you try to sit down and read the whole thing, but its perfect to scroll through, find only what you want and work on just that.

Edit: Whoops missed that, Im not sure of the exact number, but its definitely high up there. I've never ran into a problem with having too many frames, simply put. Sorry if that's not too specific.

Welcome to the site by the way!

Edited March 4, 2016 by Eriad

[Talesoffan]

Awesome thanks for the welcome! Glad to hear it's not too terrible. I tried to find the relevant portions of the ultimate tutorial but I got kinda lost on how to do just the small things I want to do. Any chance you could point me in the right direction? My friend is still in the conceptuon stages for sprites, but I wanna try and get a handle on things before he's done.

Oh, on that note, is there anything in particular he should look out for when sprinting? He has a ton of sprinting experience, so I mean more along the lines of stuff particular to spriting for FE.

[Rickochet]

it helps if you mention what these small things are, then people would know what advice to give. Ex: To me, small things could be getting the right palette for characters or changing the world map, but for others those could be a difficult thing learn. There's a lot that goes on in hacking and simply saying all the small things doesn't really help anyone trying to help you. So try to be very specific when asking for help.

as for your first post, replacing a character is fairly simple, just replace the character's portrait and edit the stats to your desired stats via nightmare character module, but also keep in mind that stats for a character are a combination of class bases and the character bases themselves. both the portrait and names, descriptions, and related can be edited via feditor. the pointers and offsets can for things like names, descriptions of the characters, and support texts can be found in the corresponding nightmare modules. hope this helps!

[Talesoffan]

Oh thanks! By small things I just meant everythung inherent to adding a character to the game. So basically everything you just said. Thanks!

[Eliwan]

Also, what is the limit for battle animation frames?

As far as I am able to tell, the only limit is that the animation can't exceed more than 16 of the cut up sheets. I had glitches with an animation that had 17 of them, but that may have been because I messed it up some other way.

As far as I KNOW, there is no actual limit to how large a battle animation can be- besides the obvious ~14 megabytes as the GBA can't handle more than 32 megabytes of data iirc.

[circleseverywhere]

There is a limit of how many tiles can fit in the OAM at any given time. My Ruby animation in particular ran into the OAM limit many times, the solution is to reduce the number of frames.

[CT075]

you can actually get around the tile limit by making frames that consist of rotations of 8x8 tiles (draw a grid and take those) of other frames

if you look closely a lot of the vanilla animations are made exactly with this in mind

[circleseverywhere]

I don't think FEditor can actually detect rotated/flipped tiles though

[CT075]

i think temp's mod is better at it (though still not perfect)

if not, zahl was working on another system that worked better

[Squidorsky]

Huh...didnt know that about the Animation frame limits...good to know...XD

But anyway, Talesoffan, not to sound like a jerk, but just using Ctrl + F and typing in what you're looking for by way of the table of contents is a good place to at least start, then if you get hung up on something thats where people can start to help you. Buuuut i went ahead and searched all of em up for you, just this once. ;D

Character 6: Character Editor (Overview of the module, its a rather straight forward process honestly)

Chapter 42 Portrait insertion with FEditor Adv

Chapter 57: Custom Battle Animations - Frames

Most tips and tricks are covered within but two really big ones for portraits to keep in mind, experienced spriter or not, is the 16 color limit (15 + 1 trans background color) and the size limit, which i forget the exact number for but there are plenty of templates out there, with a quick google search. I think after you give these a quick try or read and have a more specific problem, there'll be more specific help awaiting.

Best of luck!

[Talesoffan]

Thanks everybody for the answers!

Huh...didnt know that about the Animation frame limits...good to know...XD

But anyway, Talesoffan, not to sound like a jerk, but just using Ctrl + F and typing in what you're looking for by way of the table of contents is a good place to at least start, then if you get hung up on something thats where people can start to help you. Buuuut i went ahead and searched all of em up for you, just this once. ;D

Character 6: Character Editor (Overview of the module, its a rather straight forward process honestly)

Chapter 42 Portrait insertion with FEditor Adv

Chapter 57: Custom Battle Animations - Frames

Most tips and tricks are covered within but two really big ones for portraits to keep in mind, experienced spriter or not, is the 16 color limit (15 + 1 trans background color) and the size limit, which i forget the exact number for but there are plenty of templates out there, with a quick google search. I think after you give these a quick try or read and have a more specific problem, there'll be more specific help awaiting.

Best of luck!

Awesome, thanks for the info. I tried to Ctrl + F through the guide, but I guess my search terms were too general because they just kind of ended up being everywhere. So thank you for going to the trouble of finding that stuff for me!

Edited March 8, 2016 by Talesoffan