Layers and hardcoded stuff in animations

[Horatioactive414]

So I've been wondering how to rotate weapons and sprites and weapons in animations. I know this sounds incredibly vague, but here are a couple examples:

These are just SOME examples. But, as you can see, these pictures all share a common factor: Rather than the sprites being redrawn, they're simply rotated. I think that this is hardcoded rather than actually part of the frames, which means this is a really good way to conserve space and prevent data leaks.

I also stumbled across this:

This means the game makes use of layers; even after animations are put into the game instead of 1-layer PNG files we use. Is there a way to exploit this? It would be incredibly easy to make weapon-swap animations this way(like Falcoknights and Paladins). Now, if we somehow did, this would open up a whole new bout of opportunities. But how would we do it? Does anyone know how?

Yeah, I used MrKnight's palette sheets. Problem?

Edited December 13, 2016 by Horatioactive414

[Horatioactive414]

In hindsight, I should've marked the pictures as spoilers for size.

[CT075]

that is done via Deep Magic (read: oam tricks) and FEditor isn't actually smart enough to do that itself

WRT sprite layers there's no layering other than the pierce frame on certain animations that i know of; can you show me an example of the battle sprites actually being layered?

[Horatioactive414]

Stuff like this. The weapons seem disfigured and separated so much it seems fishy. Especially with the cavalier's lance, as it's usually obstructed by his hand. These are all animations that have the same movements but with different weapons as well.

[Eliwan]

Some of these are just inaccuracies of FEDITOR_ADV when it encounters vanilla animations that do trickery

The others are, to my knowledge, the game just drawing 2 tiles in the same location? Though Cam is one of the ones that would know best.

From my point of view; the best way to do it would be to code it up by hand (as detecting such a thing would be too close to impossible to warrant doing*).

*unless, i guess, you had multiple separate animation "layers" that would basically require the user to understand how tileflips work (and rotation is basically impossible to get to force onto something premade as far as I know); such that you could assemble it using something approaching sensible methods

[CT075]

that's what i figured you were referring to.

Those aren't actually separate layers as much as someone in the IS offices decided to save animation budget by giving the artists half-constructed frames to draw weapons onto. as far as the game is concerned, those are all one layer* - the sprite layer, which is constructed from individual 8x8 tile graphics. Now, you can do your weapon swap thing kind of if you set the game to read it parts of the sheet from elsewhere in the ROM but at that point you're literally rewriting large chunks of the entire battle animation engine

*i will retract my statement if you can show me anywhere either in the game's code or by toggling the animation layers in VBA that the weapons are drawn separately to the rest of the sprite

[Horatioactive414]

That's actually pretty interesting. They just left the template frames in the game, unused? It actually makes me think that the art department is a lot more akin to spriters in our current community. I knew that they're not as flawless as most people make them out to be(AKA the Mercenary), but I'll keep this in mind.

[CT075]

they didn't leave the templates in the game as far as i know, but the same graphic appears multiple times with only, say, the top right corner (the weapons) swapped out

[Horatioactive414]

Oh. That makes more sense.