Originally posted by CodecX™:

My heart craves a 32bit pallette FF6.

It's probably going to be stuck at 256 color for the characters. The game uses the indexed color palette to swap in other colors for various gameplay effects, most notably status effects.

Originally posted by Kisai:

It's far more likely that the JP GBA ROM is used only as a database, therefor only stuff the overlay engine is aware of would be editable. The developers probably know where the position of everything is in the GBA ROM from Square-Enix, and thus just used that. The probably had to re-enter the strings from the string pointers in the ROM file regardless so they could use the font scaling of the mobile/pc hardware instead of bitmap fonts.

If you've played "Monkey Island" it's the same kind of idea. The original game's logic/maps/collision data is used, but the "new" version depends on data that was already there. It's likely that adding anything that the new engine isn't aware of would at best be ignored, and at worst mess up the indexes.

I don't know how much power anyone would have to do such a thing, but I was imagining listening for all the times the flipped sprites were called up by the rom and giving the new engine new instructions on what to do with that call.

Nyxo is going to look into enabling higher-res sprites, so I'm waiting to see what he comes up with for now.

Since all the animations seem to be loaded from the rom, would it be possible to load new sprites added to the sprite sheets instead of flipped sprites? I'm thinking specifically of the hand waving sprites and the look right sprites which basically necessitate that the sprite be more or less semetrical since they get flipped.

Originally posted by Nyxo:

It's on my todo list to look at later, but I have other things to take care of for now ^-^
There's a chance we might be able to figure something out tho~

Not having to cram detail in pixels would make editing the sprites so much easier, and the art so much more consistent. It's so weird that there's different resolutions for different aspects of the game.

Any chance all this programming magic talk will lead to higher resolution sprites being loadable?

Unless someone alters the code, the sprites can not be made higher resolution. A file with larger dimensions inserted into the archive still just loads frames from the same coordinates as the original small image.

I have not finished with detail on the newest version of Terra. The hair is not how I want it to look yet and I still want to give her the cape and the hair ribbon. I just wanted to see what thoughts there were on taking a much bigger departure from the original sprite style.

I am not at all bothered by my new sprites not fitting with the old sprites. I want it to fit better with the monster art. I want it to fit better with the backgrounds. The chibi sprites have always been a choice they made in Final Fantasy I found distasteful. The little people running around always looked like they came from a different game and got lost. The portraits looked nothing like them. The monsters in battles looked nothing like them. The backgrounds were much more detailed and painterly. Not looking like the old sprites is pretty much exactly what I want.

Originally posted by SypherAP:

Just curious. But do you plan to sprite a base model for the human male and female characters? (Like the featureless human body.)

It would be a lot of extra work if you were you planning to create each character from complete scratch. Something neither the original game or the updated version did. And if you ever gave up on this project or needed help, you could easily share them to people who would want to help you.

Probably at some point, but I need to establish the style and fiddling with some of the characters and seeing what works and what doesn't is the only way I'm going to discover a potentially universal base.

I played through the game a bunch to try and find some of the weird sprites I don't recognize. I decided that I needed to get further away from the front on perspective of the original sprites so I started over without using the original sprite as a base. I instead used some chrono trigger sprites as a base model as they have a more top down look. I also decided to lessen some of the extra details to make the model look a little cleaner and easier to read. The proportions are now even less chibi-fied.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/pluckylump/ff6-amano/terra-amano_stand02_zps4uvkaue0.gif

Finished the sprite index. There were several I don't even know what they are. There's a lot of non-people in the character directory that I should be able to just skip.