Palette Editing?

[Jubby]

Hi everybody, I've just begun hacking these past few days, learning how to insert portraits and such... Just now, I was attempting to edit Eliwood's battle palette, using the "Quick GBAGE Method" here: http://forums.feshri...?showtopic=3073 Everything goes well until I get to the actual editing colours part. I load up the ROM, type the offset, go to image 1746, see Eliwood's sprite, but then when I try to edit the colours in the color control window, the RGB options are greyed out. This is probably a really stupid question, but I can't figure it out Anybody have any suggestions? I'll attach a screenshot of what happens. Thanks, and hello, by the way

Edited August 10, 2011 by Jubby

[Jubby]

*Forgot to attach the file*

[Nintenlord]

I disabled the editing compressed palette's and TSA's in the latest versions due to overwriting problems. Editing a palette that then is larger when compressed would silently overwrite whatever data is after that, breaking things. In this case, you'd likely break a battle animation without knowing.

[Blademaster!]

You could try my method if you still want to use GBAGE (or you can try CT075's: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=27340), but I have never used mine for FE7:

This is a simplified version of how I insert palettes. There are probably better methods, but this method is fast and works just fine. Yeah...

Anyway, if you have any trouble following this, just say so.

First, find the palette of a character who uses a class that you want to make a palette for. For this example, we want to make a new Wyvern Lord palette. So, we will use Cormag's palette as a base.

We find Cormag's palette using the palette association module in nightmare, and then open up GBAGE. We open the image and palette controls and use the image jump function to go to some number in the 2500's. We then scroll up or down till we find the class we want to make a palette for. Once we find our image, we then go to the offset we got before in the palette control, and select the compress palette option. Our result should be this:

What we do next is press save as bitmap, and then I suggest saving the file as a bitmap, though I think PNG works too. I just use bitmap anyway, and this tutorial follows as such. We then open the image in usenti. DO NOT CLOSE GBAGE! WE ARE NOT DONE WITH IT YET! It should look like this in usenti:

What we want to do now is edit the palette box on the side. Of the five lines there, we really only care about the first three. The top one is player unit palette, the second one is enemy unit palette, and the last one is NPC unit palette. It's hard to see the difference between the three with a wyvern palette, but other classes make it more obvious. Anyway, for this example, we will only edit the player unit palette. And after editing said palette, we get this small little change that I put no effort into at all:

Now, we save the file, and go back to GBAGE. We then press the import a bitmap option. For this example, we will be inserting the new palette into free space, since we kinda have to with this method. Before you press okay, your insertion options should look like this:

The only option we should have checked is the import palette option, and our offset should be some free space. We click okay, and this is our result:

We now save the rom. But we are not done just yet!

If we go to the offset where we placed our new palette in a hex editor, we will see it looks something like this:

What we need to do is make the first 3 bytes be 10 A0 00 instead of 10 00 02 and remove all the "junk" after the spot where the two 00 bytes appear in a row like so:

We do this or else the animations that play using the palette work out funny. After we do this, all we have to do is repoint the offsets in nightmare, and open up the rom, and voila!

And Glen's palette is just fine too:

This was a method I discovered how to do myself, and it does work, but if you have any problems, feel free to ask.

[Jubby]

Both of those look excellent and relatively straightforward for my nooby self, thank you! I'll try both of them and see which works best for me, and I'll be sure to hit you up if I have any questions, thanks And Nintenlord, thank you for all your work in FE Hacking, I've been following Blazer's Ultimate Tutorial to learn the ropes, and I think he uses some methods that you came up with, so thanks for making it possible for me to learn!

[Jubby]

Okay, one more question, just to sum it up.... Say I want to replace Eliwood with an original character of mine. Just as an example, say I want the character to be a mercenary, and I want him to promote to a great lord. So I would change his class directly in a hex editor to a mercenary, change the mercenary class using the class editor Nightmare module so that it promotes to a great lord, change his palettes using one of the methods you gave me, and change his portrait (And name) with FEditor Advance? Does that sound about right?

[CT075]

...That sounds like an overly complicated way to do it, but it should work.

[Jubby]

Is there an easier way? I've just been taking different methods from random guides and such and sort of piecing it together...

[CT075]

I would pick one method, try it, and if it works, stick with it. If it doesn't, repeat step 1. I wouldn't try piecing them together in bits and pieces if I were you, that's just confusing.

EDIT: And to answer your question, no.

Edited August 10, 2011 by CT075

[Jubby]

Oh no, by piecing it together I meant sort of finding at least one method to insert each aspect of my custom characters. I won't be putting it all together all haphazardly or anything. I should've made that clearer, my bad... But thanks for the info, sounds good!

[Crimson Red]

So I would change his class directly in a hex editor to a mercenary,

what? Just use the Chapter Unit Editor (it's a Nightmare Module) on the chapter he joins (e.g. chapter 11 for Eliwood) and change his class to Mercenary there. I think you got the rest correct though.

[Jubby]

Oh, okay, that makes way more sense, I read somewhere else to go into a hex editor and change the bytes that control the character's class... But thanks, that makes more sense, I haven't experimented too much with Nightmare yet. That's a way overly complicated scenario, too, I most likely wouldn't change some of the stuff, I just wanted to make sure those are workable methods to do each.

[Crimson Red]

I'd check the date on tutorials and threads you read--some of them are likely outdated and as a result you may end up doing things in ways that are harder than necessary... :\

[Jubby]

I'll definitely do that, thanks

[Jubby]

Okay, I've been using the FEditor method, and it's worked great so far, BUT! I imported a female myrmidon sprite from FE6, which worked, but now it uses a generic palette. I replaced Marcus with the myrmidon, but it doesn't use Marcus's palette, it uses the plain blue clothes and black hair, etc. Anybody have a clue as to where this palette might be stored, so that I might edit it? Here's a picture of said myrmidon in battle:

EDIT: That's the FE Recolour Method, not FEditor.... Ohboy I'm mixed up.

Edited August 15, 2011 by Jubby

[AstraLunaSol]

Marcus doesn't have an unpromoted palette, it's set to generic colours in nightmare, change it.

[Jubby]

Thank you so much, I was gonna try recolouring the sprite sheets from FEditor in Paint, but that would've taken FOREVER. No guarantee it would've worked, either. I just switched it to Yogi's palette, (Random boss nobody cares about) edited it, and then I'll make Yogi a generic boss, or use someone else's palette.

[Crimson Red]

^You can do that, or you can use one of the empty palettes in the back of the Battle Reference Array Editor. I tend to do that or just use palettes I'm not using for whatever reason. XP

[Jubby]

Sorry for the late reply, but okay, sounds good.

[Celice]

http://www.romhacking.net/utils/800/

Dunno if it's helpful to anyone or not, but since it seems most members of the community don't really leave and find things on their own, here's something for you.

[CT075]

...huh, that looks really useful. Now if we could get it to display each color value in hex, then we'd have something perfect.

[Celice]

romhacking dot net certainly isn't the greatest repository for tools, but have you tried APE yet? It's fairly old. And GBA-specific. There's this guy too. Sadly the tools, right next to actual patches, are often the things lost over time in this realm we call the internet. Data crystal might have more, if they have archives of tools.

[CT075]

I directly told people to use APE in my tutorial. The second one I've heard of, but all I can recall hearing about it was that it wasn't that much different than the GBA Color Picker.

[Crimson Red]

SNES Palette Editor doesn't edit compressed palettes, unfortunately.

APE is cool.

Impaled should be able to load palettes saved from VBA's palette viewer (Save BG... saves background palettes, Save OBJ... saves sprite palettes, IIRC) and edit them, then save them in some format. Whether that format is useful is another thing; maybe try the 15-color by 2 bytes option and view it in a hex editor, I'm too tired to think this one out anymore and too lazy/tired to actually try it... lol