Topic: Sprite extraction

[Trop]

I'm having a little difficulty getting a sprite that's sitting behind a water transparency.  The transparency is discoloring the sprite in both regular screenshots and in the tools I'm using (piken soft stuff).  Anybody have any suggestions or tool recommendations?

[Peardian]

What system is the game for? If it's the SNES, you should be able to just turn off the water layer.

[Trop]

It's for my EVO project.  Maybe I just don't know enough about layer control but I can't get transparencies to not recognize the sprites.

[Peardian]

Hmmm... it could be a special thing not tied to layers. In this case, you'll have to just load a savestate into bgmapper and extract the tiles from there. Some assembly required.


Yoshi's Island pulls one of these in submarine rooms, where everyting on screen has the bgcolor subtracted from it, giving everything a reddish tint. DKC3 also uses this with multiple backgrounds.

[Trop]

That's the thing, I tried bgmapper with little success.  It picked some of the sprites out with no problem but others remain discolored.

[Peardian]

That's because you have to cycle through the palettes given until you get a match. If the sprites are still discolored by the water when viewed this way... then that's how the sprite is meant to look and not an effect. The reason is that bgmapper reads the palettes that the sprites use. This is pure as you can get.

[Trop]

I was afraid of that.  I thought I could fix it because some of the discolored sprites there appear with normal coloration in other levels.  They must be two versions of the same sprite, one for the submerged level and one for the dry.

[Will]

Whilst extracting the sprites on the gameplay, besides removing layers on the game, disabling the "New GFX Engine" might come in handy. I often use it on ZSnesw142 whenever I run into watery and misty areas of a game level, which makes certain sprites clearer to extract. To toggle the "New GFX Engine", press '8' whilst the game is running.

[Trop]

Interestingly enough that does change the color of some of the sprites, making them neon, but not the ones I'm after.  I guess the discoloration is actually the real coloration like Peardian said and the designers figured that it was the only place the sprite would appear so no one would ever know or care.