Custom World Maps in-game

[Haku]

Hi everyone, I was thinking of making a world map for the Shatterlight hack, and I have a couple of questions.

I know that people like Primefusion have managed to do this for their own hack, and I'm pretty much at a loss of how to do this so:

Is there a colour limit (e.g 16)?

Is there a maximum dimension limit?

Is there a tutorial on how to do it?

Thanks in advance!

[Lord Glenn]

Hopefully everything you need answers to are found in this thread. (At the very least, the last question should be covered by it.)

Edited December 14, 2013 by Lord Glenn

[Haku]

Thanks Glenn! This looks quite confusing.

Basically, I am not getting involved in insertion, LunaSaint would be doing that: I'm just doing the graphics part. Is there a palette which can be linked for the FE7 ingame world map?

[Alfred Kamon]

Can't you use VBA's tools to find that, Haku?

[Primefusion]

I'll throw down some additional info about the "zoomed out" world map. Aka this guy: Click

World Map Full View
Image: 0x005D0AC0
240X176 Image
Image #1095 in GBAGE (Width: 30 Height: 32)
Uses 4 palettes starting at 5D0A40

So, here's the thing. It's a 240x176 image, but you can't use the bottom 16 rows. Why? TSA.

Check this out.

See how in the upper left there's a missing 8x8 box? That box is found in the bottom left instead. The game will flip the box in place when it displays. It needs to be formatted like this so the game can figure out what the background color is.

Oh, and don't mind the palette at the bottom, the game doesn't display the bottom 16 rows anyway so that was really just for me.

And I have no idea how to utilize all 64 colors. I just pasted the same 16 color palette 4 times.

[Haku]

So would this be able to be inserted if I formatted it correctly?

(I think its WAY too big)

Edited December 14, 2013 by Haku

[AstraLunaSol]

I'm pretty sure in the topic it says how big the map is allowed to be in pixels, also if the colour limit is the problem, then you can just make the map variances of a single colour. Pretty sure the dof world map uses only 16 colours, lumi just made it brown since we were going for a parchment effect anyway.

also please don't make the countries yellow, it's impossible to see the name

This is how big the map is.

However, this version requires TSA knowledge to get to work, like in the topic earlier linked.

Edited December 14, 2013 by AstraLunaSol

[Primefusion]

How did you get the palette to work across the different "chunks" of the map?

When I inserted the different pieces of mine it would keep changing the index order of the colors because they didn't appear in the same order as previous pieces (My larger world map is 16 colors too).

I had to put the palette in the upper left of each image...

[AstraLunaSol]

Jubby is magical, that's how.

On a serious note, I think Jubby reordered all the segments of the map in terms of palette so they were all in the same order, because when I look at the palette viewer this image has 4 sets of 16 colours, all in the same order.

[Jubby]

sorry I missed this, just finished calculus final, fuck me.

How did you get the palette to work across the different "chunks" of the map?

When I inserted the different pieces of mine it would keep changing the index order of the colors because they didn't appear in the same order as previous pieces (My larger world map is 16 colors too).

I had to put the palette in the upper left of each image...

The best method for any GBAGE insertion process that I've found is to first, insert the palette separately (I personally use wingrit to get a pal.bin file and then C/P that to the original offset; I know that program can be intimidating to some people though so if you have another method, that's fine :P) then load an image with that palette and save as a PNG.

From there, you can just C/P your graphics into that image, save with 8-bit palette, then reinsert. Because the palette is the same as the original, they'll all insert beautifully.

I'm hoping this makes sense - I'm planning a comprehensive Usenti/GBAGE tutorial for SF/the UT at some indeterminate point in the future so if it doesn't I'll try to explain it better then.

Check this out.

See how in the upper left there's a missing 8x8 box? That box is found in the bottom left instead. The game will flip the box in place when it displays. It needs to be formatted like this so the game can figure out what the background color is.

This is not technically true, as is typical for these graphics, the game just takes it as read that the 1st color is the background/transparent color. This is just so it has a nice transparent tile in the 0 slot. (most of the graphics have a transparent tile in this spot - except battle frames for some reason :/)

probably no one will read this

[Primefusion]

probably no one will read this

I've read and reread this but I'm not producing the right results. Let's do a double check.

1) Open big ol' map in Wingrit and export the palette as a .bin file (My map palette happens to already be indexed)

2) Copy/paste palette at the correct offset in the ROM

3) Open GBAGE + ROM and save a temporary image that uses the newly pasted palette.

4) Copy map chunks into the temporary image and insert the image to the correct offsets.

5) Somehow obtain what I want? (A world map where I don't need to put the palette in every chunk.)

This is not technically true, as is typical for these graphics, the game just takes it as read that the 1st color is the background/transparent color. This is just so it has a nice transparent tile in the 0 slot. (most of the graphics have a transparent tile in this spot - except battle frames for some reason :/)

I've reread this like 6 times and it seems like a more technical way of saying what I did.

[Jubby]

@first bit, yeah that's right :P If it doesn't work send it over to me and I can try and insert a couple for you if you want?

@second bit, what I mean is, it takes the 1st colour in the indexed palette as the background/transparent - it doesn't have anything to do with the first tile. You can make the first tile anything you want :P