Everybody Gets a Chocobo!

This project is completed. Version 1.1 is available as an attachment. It offers riding sprites for:
1. Leo
2. Banon
3. Esper Terra
4. Merchant
5. Ghost

It also fixes the following:
1. Esper Terra now has a tent. Her eye shading was fixed on 2 rarely-used sprites.
2. The Ghost's tent was recolored to bone-white.
3. The "surprised" face for the Soldier Sprite has been redrawn so as not to look like a glitch.
4. Esper Terra and Kefka's Save Screen/Party Select Screen Palettes are incorrect in the base rom. Both are set to Palette "0". I have corrected these to "5" for Esper Terra and "3" for Kefka.

The file contains the IPS patch for a 1.0 headered rom, as well as a folder containing the 6 edited spritesheets. Credits for the sprites are as follows:
Banon Riding Sprite - LeetSketcher
Leo Riding Sprite - Fauntleroy/FedoraJoe (General Leo Edition) (hair animation added by PowerPanda)
Additional Sprites for Esper Terra, Merchant, Ghost, and Soldier - PowerPanda

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ORIGINAL POST:

I am working on a small hack right now that I plan to release as a standalone. The premise is simple: everyone who is ever in your party gets a Chocobo riding sprite. This includes Leo, Banon, Merchant/Doma Guard, Ghost, and either Esper Terra or Kefka. To accomplish this, I'm relocating Gestahl's sprite from D6/F120-D6/F11F to D4/F920-D4/FFFF (currently free space in the rom), then shifting the pointers for the remaining graphics. I've got a working ROM right now with placeholder graphics.

First off, note that the graphics expansion tutorial up on Youtube, the Rom Map on the wiki, and the C2 disassembly leave off a very important bank of information when working with characters who will be in battle. The following 2 banks are mentioned:

C0/D0F2-C0/D23B Pointers to Sprite Graphics (lower word)
C0/D23C-C0/D385 Pointers to Sprite Graphics (upper word)

However, there is an undocumented bank
C2/CE43-C2/CE8A Pointers to Battle Sprite Graphics (3 bytes per character)

Here's the breakdown:

Code:

C2/CE43 - 00 00 D5 Terra (so, the sprite begins at D5/0000)
C2/CE46 - A0 16 D5 Locke
C2/CE49 - 40 2D D5 Cyan
C2/CE4C - E0 43 D5 Shadow
C2/CE4F - 80 5A D5 Edgar
C2/CE52 - 20 71 D5 Sabin
C2/CE55 - C0 87 D5 Celes
C2/CE58 - 60 9E D5 Strago
C2/CE5B - 00 B5 D5 Relm
C2/CE5E - A0 CB D5 Setzer
C2/CE61 - 40 E2 D5 Mog
C2/CE64 - E0 F8 D5 Gau
C2/CE67 - 80 0F D6 Gogo
C2/CE6A - 20 26 D6 Umaro
C2/CE6D - C0 3C D6 Biggs or Wedge (untested)
C2/CE70 - 60 53 D6 Imp
C2/CE73 - 00 6A D6 Leo
C2/CE76 - 60 7F D6 Banon
C2/CE79 - C0 94 D6 Esper Terra
C2/CE7C - 20 AA D6 Merchant
C2/CE7F - 80 BF D6 Ghost
C2/CE82 - E0 D4 D6 Kefka
C2/CE85 - 60 7F D6 Gestahl
C2/CE88 - C0 3C D6 Biggs or Wedge (untested)

Now, for the questions.

QUESTION 1: Existing graphics?
I've found existing sprite sheets for Leo and Banon with riding sprites. It won't be hard to create some for the Merchant, Ghost, and Esper Terra, but if anyone has already done the work, let me know.

QUESTION 2: Who doesn't get expanded?
By relocating Gestahl, I have room for 5 of the 6 character sheets to get expanded. Any sheet that has a portrait is a given for me, so Leo, Banon, and Ghost are a must. I also want to include the Merchant, since it is possible to sequence break and keep Locke permanently in the merchant's clothes. That leaves it to Esper Terra and Kefka to not get expanded. I personally think that it is more useful to have Esper Terra, as that would allow someone to create an event to change Terra's graphics and palette. However, if any of you would RATHER I expand Kefka, speak now.

QUESTION 3: Extra Portrait
Depending on the answer to Question 2, there may be an opportunity to add in the Esper Terra or Kefka Portrait from the GBA version (or even for someone to create a merchant portrait). After relocating Gestahl into the free space in D4/F606-D4/FFFF, I still have 793 bytes remaining in that space. From what I can tell, a portrait takes up 683 bytes (including the 32-byte palette), meaning that there is SPACE to add another. However, this is an extremely low priority for me, and I haven't looked into what it would entail. Does anyone know off the top of their head what it would take to add a new portrait? Is it way more trouble than it is worth?

This is a good hack idea. Adding a portrait is possible, Novalia Spirit bank $C3 is all documented. However there is separated code for the party select screen, the status screen and the main menu. IIRC the ID for the portrait is fetched from the GFX set of the character ($1601) and there is a special case handling for imp status.

You could add more exception cases for Esper Terra as an example. RotDS required portraits for guest actors, so to solve this thing one and for all I made a table of 48 word pointers for all actors and based the portrait ID on actor ID ($1600) if character is above $10, to keep compatibility with FF3se and not move the vanilla portraits (actos $00-$0F).

I made good progress today. I have all the sprite sheets done. I also discovered that one of my assumptions was wrong. You CAN cross banks with sprites. So if I move Terra to the end of D4, then shift all of the first 21 sprites accordingly, I can include Kefka and still have space to spare. It will make FF3usME unusable for character graphics editing, but people should still be able to edit a clean rom and use a hex editor to drop the code in. With that, this hack will provide full spritesheets for 21 playable characters!

One snag I've hit is the save screen. It seems to have a different sprite pointer than field or battle. I'll be searching that out next time I get time, but I'm done for tonight.

EDIT: I knew I couldn't sleep until I found that bank of save screen/formation sprite pointers. It's at CF/F911-CF/F969. There are 4 bytes per character, though I don't know what the second byte does.
For example, Leo's sprite data is located at D6/6A00. In the formation pointers, he is listed at CF/F951 as "D6 00 00 6A". I tried changing the second byte to see if it was the palette, but it wasn't. Anyway, as of now, if I don't add Kefka's riding sprite, I'm done. If I do, I'll have to create Kefka's riding sprite and then manually re-point all of the sprites. In total, probably about 2 hours worth of work.

have you dealt with shop menu sprites as well?

have you dealt with shop menu sprites as well?

It hasn't been a problem yet, since characters above Umaro don't appear in the shop. However, if I move Terra's sprite, I will probably have to worry about that. Do you know where those offsets are entered? I only searched for permutations of the Leo/Banon/Esper sprite pointer pattern to find my offsets, and those wouldn't be included in any shop data.

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So I took an in-depth look on the OAM notes B-Run and HatZen compiled on the full 16-character roster hack, and I learned a ton, including how to fix a problem that has been plaguing me on my main hack. However, OAM is ridiculously complicated, and the long and short of it is that the Kefka riding sprites simply aren't worth that hassle. All of the other sprites are working fine, both in the party select screen and the save screen (except for the known miscoloration of Esper Terra's sprite, which I don't plan to fix at this point). I'm going to call it good. I'll clean it up and submit it to romhacking.net this weekend.

https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3580.html

This sprite expansion should also allow riding sprites for everyone. It does require ROM expansion though.

If you still need sprites they are available in the repository (I think the sprite database also includes most of them)

I did some tests though and noticed the riding sprites are still loaded from the old location. It seems the riding sprites themselves have specific pointers somewhere. Please post if you have a working ips so I can compare and try to figure out my error.

dunno, but the others should know it

Finished, and added to attachments on the original post. I've also changed the name of the hack to "Everybody Gets a Chocobo".

So far, I've checked:
1. All existing characters.
2. Adding the new sprites to various characters on a save file.
3. Vicks/Wedge in the opening section, to make sure nothing was corrupted.
4. Switching to the Soldier and Merchant in Locke's scenario
5. The sections of the game with Banon and Leo in your party. The Leo battle also calls Kefka's and Gestahl's battle sprites, so I checked those.
6. The Gestahl banquet, to make sure that his relocated sprite was operating correctly on field graphics.

The only place that I didn't check was on the Floating Continent, as I don't have a backed up save file for that section of the game. Can you guys give this hack a once-over and make sure you're not seeing any bugs?

Really great work on this! I don't have free time really to test people's work but hopefully someone will have the chance to do it.. I'm tempted to move this in the patch sub-forum, but it's more than a single feature patch but less than a complete hack so I'm not really sure where to put it (maybe aslo leave the thread here..). What do you prefer?

I consider this a bugfix patch, so it can move to the sub-forum.