Topic: 4bpp Graphics Backport

[Gedankenschild]

Not familiar with FF4, but is it possible the palette color at that position is being overwritten in the code?

I haven't really looked at the actual code myself. What I can say is that the color in question would be the transparent color of a potential second 8-color palette in that line. The game does tend to load 8-color palettes twice (see the lowest two). It's kind of strange that they made the second part move anyway, since it doesn't have any effect in the original game... 

[chillyfeez]

Hey, Gedankenschild.
Unfortunately, I don't have much good to report on this front.
I can tell you this: When a non-animated monster is summoned (Imp, Cocktric, Mage, Bomb, Mist?), the subroutine that makes the summoned monster flash before attacking (Flash black, like enemy monsters do when attacking) is buried somewhere in the routine at 01/E009 (LoROM). But unfortunately, there's a whole lot of other stuff buried in that routine, and I just don't think I know/understand enough about interpreting SNES graphical code to figure out much more that that...
 
Sorry. Hope you weren't counting on me to come up with some huge revelation...

[Gedankenschild]

That's OK, chillyfeez. Thanks for taking a look nonetheless!
I will take a look myself at some point. Even if I were unable to fix it, it wouldn't be a complete disaster. It's not even that noticable if you arrange the palette the right way - we'll see...

[Gedankenschild]

Time to report some more progress! I spent a bit of time staring at those DMA routines the game uses to load overworld/location protagonist and location graphics and finally understood how they work (at least enough for my needs). Some simplifications will be necessary - at least with some locations. I need to look at the way the game decides which tileset to load. If it's possible to have more than one town tileset and make different towns load different sets that would be pretty neat! On the other hand it sounds like quite a drag, rewriting the properties and palette associations to this point took a bit of time! I need a break... 

P.S. And of course the game has to use different routines for all sprites - world map protagonists, location protagonists, protagonists splitting up for a cutscene (no kidding), townspeople, vehicles... 

[Grimoire LD]

Time to report some more progress! I spent a bit of time staring at those DMA routines the game uses to load overworld/location protagonist and location graphics and finally understood how they work (at least enough for my needs). Some simplifications will be necessary - at least with some locations. I need to look at the way the game decides which tileset to load. If it's possible to have more than one town tileset and make different towns load different sets that would be pretty neat! On the other hand it sounds like quite a drag, rewriting the properties and palette associations to this point took a bit of time! I need a break... 

P.S. And of course the game has to use different routines for all sprites - world map protagonists, location protagonists, protagonists splitting up for a cutscene (no kidding), townspeople, vehicles... 

Other than the inky water and the green squares around the bushes, this looks pretty grand Gedankenschild!

[Gedankenschild]

Other than the inky water and the green squares around the bushes, this looks pretty grand Gedankenschild!

And I worked so hard on that water! 
Yes, the moving parts have their own loading code - I haven't looked at that, yet. The remake does indeed only have those kinds of bushes. They solved this by having these "edge of the road" tiles that take up A LOT of tiles. I do want to introduce them, though. It really does smooth things out.

[Grimoire LD]

Now That looks much better! Good work so far!

[Gedankenschild]

Now That looks much better! Good work so far!

That last one was from the Wonderswan version... 
But thanks anyway, I'm working on it! 

[JCE3000GT]

Jesus that looks incredible!  I love the fact that Final Fantasy 4 is getting the love and attention now.  Pretty soon you'll be able to do a completely new game with its engine.   :D

[chillyfeez]

Pretty soon you'll be able to do a completely new game with its engine.   :D

Working on it... Slowly but surely ;)

[Gedankenschild]

I just realized it's been about a year since I first introduced my project here. And I'm starting to feel like a miser looking at all of you sharing at least alpha versions of your stuff...
So it's time to throw something out there and show I wasn't posting mock-ups here all along!

Below is a link to a beta patch that replaces all the 8-color enemies and summons with their 16-color Wonderswan counterparts. It should be applied to a headerless ROM of the 1.1 US version (1.0 might work - never checked).

I tested it with some of your patches and it seems to work up to the point where changes to graphics and palettes and the corresponding tables were made. These will obviously be overwritten by THIS patch...

Feel free to post feedback, bug reports and the like.
If you'd like to incorporate this into a hack of your own and have questions feel free to ask.



https://www.dropbox.com/s/6pwe7oldoo1qb9h/FF2enemies.zip?dl=0

Regards!

[Grimoire LD]

Oh man! That is some terrific work! I'm also kind of surprised that you ran into the rare spawn Green Dragon of all things while testing out Combat Boost, haha! This will likely become a standard upgrade to all patches in time, I'd imagine.

[Gedankenschild]

That was a total coincidence. I thought "Let's take a screenshot with Grimoire's patch.", loaded the game, ran into the first dungeon, and there it was!

[Bahamut ZERO]

This is some amazing work man! Seems to work with my project quite well. Definitely cool to see enemies on the level as character battle sprites BPP-Wise!

I'd love to incorporate this into my project when it hits it's final stages (which admittedly won't be for a long time). But until that point I'll defintely use it while I test it out (yay, backups!).

One question (for the time being anyway):  Are the Weapon graphics still in 3BPP? 

EDIT: Nope, still 3BPP. :)


Hmm, that's odd...  my edits to weapons graphic aren't working properly (example: instead of seeing my edits, I'm still seeing the vanilla weapon graphics).

Other than that I'm seeing no problems or conflicts, which is very awesome!


EDIT 2: *facepalm* nevermind, just found a 4BPP version of the weapon graphics haha. Works like charm. :)

[Kea]

This is very impressive! Especially since graphics code totally stumps me.