Player Portraits and FFT

FFT portraits

The more I look at these the more I'm digging the idea of using Final Fantasy Tactics profile pictures to fill in some npc blanks.

How much work is required to convert them over to FF6 format during the insertion process?

To be perfectly honest, this kinda stuff is almost enough to make me bug out and hack tactics for awhile again...

FFVI's portraits are 40x40 and these are 32x48. While making them shorter height would be no problem, there's the width problem as we would either have to zoom in, making pixels disorted, or finish them from one side.

Both methods can take some time, though the second is easier in a lot of these portraits where there are only a few pixels left from each side. Heck, some may be cut in a way that doesn't require filling, like those without hats or bulky neck-high clothing/armor, but not all of them.

Did a quick hatchet job on one of the FFT vanilla portraits, then realized while I had expanded the table for portraits but didn't do the code/pointer adjustments yet...

Regardless, a quick hatchet job. Little filling on both sides (naturally alittle more on the easier back side, little less on the face side) then chopped it down to fit. The hardest part actually seems to be the height, least in my test case. Best I could pull on a quicky was a flat spot on the top of the head. Still considering time + effort, didn't come out bad at all. A quick preview in game, even with the poor spritemanship, it actually fit fairly well with the normal ones (well didn't stand out like a hot pink goose in a flock of snow white chickens).

So personal opinion, yeah it should be worth the effort. Don't seem myself replacing any vanilla portraits, but this really feels like a good solution for filling in missing portraits. "Missing", not portraits that I have a more FF6 style alternative to use.

Hrm... why I didn't see this problem before, what to do about portrait palettes? Having to share them, whew that'd suck, in both the doing and the results I'd imagine.

Lol. I've been doing this for years in all of my edits. Amano's artwork is beautiful, but it wasn't represented well in the in-game portraits. They're always the first to go in my hacks. I hae more than a few original ones I've put together, and it only takes me about an hour to dole out a new one. And waaaaaay less if we're just using the pre-existing npc pics from tactics. (Kids, old lady, ect...). I'm totally willing to help with this project, if y'all are interested. ^_^

Honestly, I think the whole thing is going to get turned into a "build a patch" workshop of sorts. Best idea I have, not counting the work required. Anyway, looks like its going to be the main patch/code and sprites, then a couple of choices.
1.All Tactics style portraits
2. Normal portraits with custom portraits when available then fill in blanks with Tactics.
3. All right facing sprite for portraits
4. All random sprite poses for portraits
Possibly a 5th that just a bunch of shadow siloets for ones I don't have.

Course all this depends on what the portrait palettes allow, no way I want to try and make 160+ sprite portraits share 20 or less palettes... should know soon enough.

That being said, hells yeah I'd take help on that part. Need a portrait that matches up with every humanoid sprite in the game... plus a few extra hopefully. Yeah, I probably need a different type of help to, but I'd be happy with what I can get.

Cool beans! Ill start working on some when I get home. Pallet wise, I'll see if I can build them on top of ones i already have, and try to keep them recycled. The main color difference in each pallett is the hair anyway. Which means the blonds can all recycle celes or Edgar's port palette, brunets (like Rachel) can use cyan's, ect..

Actually now that you mention it, them sharing might not be as bad as I expected. Still hope for other option(slim but possible).

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On a high note, I can only possibly go up to sprite number 83 for portraits due to table restrictions. Well, for all practical purposes, #83. Could write in an exception to load a second table but... I think 83 will be plenty. Only 83...