i believe i’ve read something about it before, but i can’t remember where.
i searched around for a while, but since i couldn’t find any clue, i’ll just ask here: is there a way to remove the lateral box limit on portraits?
to be more specific, the purple areas on the sides:
as i’ve grown quite tired of those limitations, i wanted to know if there were alternatives available in order to help myself( and make overall a bit more detailed mugs ).
otherwise, i could always make custom sprites for fun like i did in the past, but then they wouldn’t be insertable.
maybe Tactile has that limit removed, but i could be wrong as i’m not really into hacking tools.
not sure about the “vanilla” engine, in case there’s some trickery to deal with that too like a patch or something.
But IIRC you can’t add more than the 32x16 pixels due to memory limit.
There’s also the halfbody patch, which makes the portrait size like FE9/10, but you can only have 2 portraits at a time in conversations because basically you are using the space from the other portraits for extra space.
You can certainly extend the portrait box, if youre willing to free up space in vram somewhere else for it. Now I’m going to assume the question is “has someone already made the code to do this for me” and not “I want to learn how to write the code myself”, in which case, see the above answer.
The weird thing about this is that there’s a topic somewhere on this site where someone talked about how they figured out how to fill out the portrait area. Someone else said that it wasn’t feasible since it would exceed the pixel limit for portrait storage, but the guy responded that he reorganized the tiles in such a way that they filled out the same space in VRAM (something like that). The topic looked like it was gaining traction as another person started contributing, but then it suddenly died out. Everyone stopped posting and nothing came of it.
Natch, my terrible searching ability can’t find the topic anymore. It wasn’t the usual hackbox idea, it was a different method. It was something l was gonna make a topic about myself a year ago, but l gave up hope on it.
maybe Tactile has that limit removed, but i could be wrong as i’m not really into hacking tools.
Given that tactile is an engine and computer program and not a hacking tool of any kind (and that existing projects in it like Immortal Sword and Staff of Ages use halfbodies instead of standard GBA size), I would presume these limitations don’t apply.
so basicly the limit can only be increased by a couple of 16x16 boxes?
if that’s how it works, then at least it’s already a bit bigger than before. not by much, but better than nothing i guess.
the question would actually be: what’s the most used between FEBuilder and Tactile?
or rather, do people use mostly traditional mugs or half bodies?
if i understood correctly, with the first method there would be more mugs available during conversations, as long as they don’t take too much space( including those two 16x16 boxes ).
that would work in terms of quantity, wich is always something nice to have for cutscenes, but the mugs would still follow the “traditional” formula with just a small improvement.
with the 2nd one, there would be more space for the portraits themself, but with a maximum of 2 per conversation regardless of space.
that would probably work better in terms of quality, but then it would put conversations on a basic level of interaction.
judging by what’s usually posted in the repository topic, my guess is that the traditional mugs are the way to go.
while i see half body portraits popping up once in a while, it seems that they’re not as popular as the other ones, so i’d rather focus on something that the majority of people around here can actually use.
i could eventually make a sprite for each version of the portraits, although i’m not sure if it would be worth the effort.
in any case, thx for the infos.
Regarding the hackbox capabilities, you get two tiles that you can place anywhere that’s 8x8 aligned. You can’t fill the whole space, but you get two squares to place anywhere in that space. These custom tiles are stored in the lower-right corner.
Another limitation to be aware of is the very upper-rightmost yellow title. That 8x8 yellow tile in the very upper-right corner. That’s unusable in certain GBA situations. It’s usually in the particular combination of the blinking status screen hack and using the higher portrait in the status screen. That corner gets repeated for all empty alpha tiles, so it’s safest to keep that corner empty as well.
I’m not sure about normal hacking and Tactile, but i know for a fact Lex Talionis, which is in my opinion the best of the three softwares to do Fire Emblem Fangames, does not have the limited hackbox where the edges get cut off, AND does not have the 16 color limit, while also being extremely customisable if you know Python.
Klok made a great comparison post between the three. Keep in mind the post is half a year old at this point, and LT is getting updated on the daily, so there are many more features than listed there.
And if you’re interested in Lex Talionis here is a link to the LT Discord Server
