So I made Marisa a Mercenary... She can't promote.

[Kyne]

I was dicking around in nightmare with FE8 and I realized that there is actually data in the game for a female mercenary and hero. Immediately this led me to believe that Marmar was going to be a merc in development or something but above all else I wanted to experiment with it! I added custom animations for both classes (Ekhidna's animations for Hero class and The Blind Archer's FemMerc).

The promotion branches are already there (Nightmare told me that it was FemRanger and FemHero just like male Merc), The stats were there, though I fiddled with them a bit (mainly just CON) and Marisa COULD use the Hero Crest as a promotion item, but when I did it the screen just went black.

I then made a custom pointer for the Hero's Crest again with all the classes that promote from it included (male and female) but it did the same thing.

Could it be an animation issue or is it something else? I'll keep experimenting but I'd love the help!

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I went ahead and tried to edit the myrmidon into having custom merc stats and battle animations as well as the swordmaster into having custom Hero battle animations and stats (So really I changed Eirika and Seth into a Myrmidon and Swordmaster respectively).

The battle animations (as in, IN BATTLE) work just dandy for both classes in any weapon they equip as well as unarmed. and as it turns out, the FemHero also has an unused standing map animation (which i'm guessing is just Ekhidna's).

But again... as soon as I tried promoting Eirika the screen went black and did not change back.

I then changed the battle animations of the FemHero (or in this case, the FemSwordmaster) into those of the Male Hero and VOILA it works.

So it was just the FemHero animations. On that note, is it just that FE6 animations are not compatible with FE8? I straight up just "dumped" Ekhidna's scripts from my FE6 Rom.

If so, is there a way for me to edit them into being compatible or a place where I can get a compatible femHero sprite?

I kinda wanted to use these in a bigger project once I'm a bit more knowledgeable of this stuff.

Edited October 4, 2016 by Kyne

[shadowofchaos]

It's not the animation. There's a pointer issue if you're getting a black screen.

Echidna's animations are 100% compatible with FE8.

Replace Eirika's lord animation on a clean ROM to confirm this.

[Kyne]

Well I did (ish). I replaced Eirika's class with the Myrmidon and made her lvl 10 in order to make her promote and made Seth the Swordmaster(F) in order to see if the battle sprites (sword, ax, hand ax and unarmed) worked before hand. All of this was in a separate rom to Marisa's Mercenary class. (In that one, Eirika and Seth are their normal classes and I straight up used the unused class data for fMerc and fHero)

I did have to make a custom animation pointer for the Hero because of the extra animations for axes and hand axes but I just used one of the default pointers from nightmare and placed that onto the "battle animation pointer" in the class editor. That should work right?

The problem only comes up when promoting and only with her. Not to mention the issue was solved when changing back the animations for the class into those of the male hero.

Right now I'm on my phone but once I'm back on the computer I'm going to try to add the animations through HxD rather than nightmare and see if anything changes, though I doubt it because the only thing it would allow me to do is add the ranged ax animations for the tomahawk and the hatchet instead of only the hand ax.

[shadowofchaos]

You're really not making this any easier on yourself.

You need to calm yourself and stop trying to make so many things work at once.

If you want to see if the animations are the issue, just replace an animation in a separate ROM.

Don't edit the classes, just see if the animation works.

If you want to do promotion pointers, solve it by first doing it to promote to a different class.

If you want to make custom battle animations, do so in a clean ROM with existing animations.

Then put it together when you get things working.

At this point, you're not eliminating problems to one thing by breaking it down and are just doing it all at once.

That's making a mess when asking "why doesn't it work"?

[Kyne]

You're really not making this any easier on yourself.

You need to calm yourself and stop trying to make so many things work at once.

If you want to see if the animations are the issue, just replace an animation in a separate ROM.

Don't edit the classes, just see if the animation works.

If you want to do promotion pointers, solve it by first doing it to promote to a different class.

If you want to make custom battle animations, do so in a clean ROM with existing animations.

Then put it together when you get things working.

At this point, you're not eliminating problems to one thing by breaking it down and are just doing it all at once.

That's making a mess when asking "why doesn't it work"?

Sorry about that, I tend to get in over my head and overreact when I mess up. Need to work on that.

So I tried t replace the General(M)'s animations with the female hero. I also made Gilliam lvl 10 and gave him a knight's crest so he could promote.

Worked wonders! The sprite was there (and Gilliam's palette fits the FemHero sprite surprisingly well). The sprite that popped up at first was still the general with the lance because I forgot to replace that one and it is their main weapon. I replaced it with the axe, worked fine. I replaced it with the sword and it worked fine. I then tested the battle animations and it wall worked fine as well. (sword, ax, hand ax and unarmed)

I'm pretty sure the promo pointers are there as well for the FemMerc to use. (because Marisa was able to use the item)

The promotion branches are there for the femMerc as well (FemHero and FemRanger)

I re-tested this by changing Eirika into an Armorknight and having her promote.

Worked wonders as well. I'm now thoroughly convinced that I just added the animations wrong in my first two attempts. It's odd because they did function in battle pretty much perfectly but I guess I messed up the pointer somehow.

Tried to do the custom animations for the great knight in another clean rom to see if the armor knight could promote properly (with animations already in the game, it was just a custom pointer) and the same problem happened. Franz (who I made a great knight) had all the right battle animations but Gilliam could not promote.

So I think it's safe to say that you were right and it is a pointer issue.

After this i tried changing the promotion branches on this rom for the armor knight to make the armor knight promote into general and manakete instead and it worked perfectly. I guess my pointer just isn't setting the "promotion animation"?

EDIT: I tried to do it through HxD in a separate rom afterwards since it would allow me to place as many animations as possible and it did not work out for some reason. After setting the Battle Animation Pointers the battle animations did not display (playing instead the map animations).

I then tried again with the built in nightmare module and it did not work out. The animations all worked but Eirika still could not promote.I'm a little peeved here >.< What the heck am I doing wrong to these pointers? I'm following every instruction given to me in tutorials.

Edited October 5, 2016 by Kyne

[Kyne]

I'm terribly sorry for the double post (and somewhat of a bump) but I'm completely stumped here.

I also figured screenshots would help.

http://imgur.com/a/dQ8NG

That's a small album detailing my process in trying to set the custom animation pointers.

Any help would be AMAZING and thanks to shadow for helping me narrow the issue down to it being a pointer issue (even though he knew it from the start and I decided to have a meltdown >.>)

[Eliwan]

i was so sure i was being an idiot but then it turned out i wasn't so

The issue is that you need to edit the 08, 09, 0A, and 0B entries after each animation* to be all completely zeroes; better explained in hex though

00 01 13 00 09 01 14 00 00 00 00 00 FF FF FF FF

(i believe this is your myrmidon animation set with the 00 edit)

this is 4 bytes that denote the animation:

[What Weapon or Type], [All Weapons Or A Specific], [Animation Halfword Low], [Animation Halfword High].

Since classes have different weapon/animation counts (hero, fighter, blade lord, etc), there needs to be a terminator to the list of animations; which is represented by four 00s.

*you would need to change which bytes these are based on how many animations the class needs, as well.

Class points to a list of 4 bytes; the first two of which tell the game first WHAT it is looking at, which it iterates through till it finds the thing labelled as what it is looking for, then it uses the next two bytes to determine what to actually display.

[Kyne]

I am... the biggest of idiots.

I did this every single time I tried in HxD but COMPLETELY FUCKING IGNORED IT WHEN DOING IT IN NIGHTMARE.

>.< Thank you kind stranger, I can now have my custom animations at will.

Every time I try something programming-related I always mess up in the mot obvious of issues. (fuck those C# ";"s)