FE8 / FEBuilder / Misc inquiries from a new romhacker

Questions
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1

Hey yall new here, first post, hopefully I’m doing this right. Been investigating my issue for a solid couple days, searching topics here and elsewhere, etc. and not had much luck diagnosing the cause, hoping maybe someone here might be able to help me out with that.

I am new to romhacks in general and am working in FEbuilder hacking Sacred Stones. Template here is saying ‘please remember to attach report.7z’ but I am not quite sure how to get that or really what that means, but would be happy to do so if I can get that clarified.

  • Hacking method:

Mostly I have been working with the sprites, replacing assets for primarily Ephraim and Eirika along with a few others, as well as some text/asset replacement for their prf weapons and such (which I don’t think should be relevant, but thought I should mention JIC).

  • Base Game:

I noticed in testing my rom that the custom map sprite I’m using for my Eirika unit has some stray pixels on the first frame of the ‘selected’ animation when viewed on the status screen and in the field. I verified that the issue is not with the sprites by adding the same sprite sheet to a fresh FE8 rom where they do not appear, and investigated the issue as thoroughly as I could elsewhere, including the thread in this forum titled ‘FE8, FEbuilder, Map sprite issue’ (site isn’t allowing me to link the thread in my post sadly) – not sure if this is the same issue, but based on the advice offered in thread I tried paring down the number of map sprites in the rom (consolidating gendered classes to use the same map sprites, mostly), although I don’t think that’s quite the issue I’m having here since it’s also happening on the status screen as well as the map when the unit is selected.

  • Steps to reproduce:

Regrettably I don’t have a particularly good repro method for this; considering the sprites work fine in a fresh rom, I’m like 90% sure that this issue is a product of my fumbling trial-and-error methods of learning how to use FEB; I shuffled sprites in the base game around a lot, reassigned pathing here and there, enough that I could not reliably suggest everything I did that could be correlated.

I do have my suspicions of some fiddling that might be correlated, which I will list below:

  • initially changed Eirika’s ‘support class’ section in the Character Editor to shaman (attempting to swap her with Sophia), including adding the FE6 F shaman/druid map sprites in on the unused F shaman/druid slots in FE8 (noticed this caused the standing sprites for both to change, so reverted it later)
  • after the above, reverted Eirika to Lord and instead changed the class to match the FE6 fem Shaman, including the map sprites for the Lord class (and likewise the Eirika Great Lord was changed to this custom Oracle class with the custom map sprites in the screenshot).
  • the only other custom map sprites I’ve added to the game were replacements for Ephraim’s Lord+Great Lord and the Necromancer class. Only other fiddling with which files correspond to which classes was the aforementioned shaman/druid trial-and-error fudging.
  • I doubt this would be correlated, but the combat animations I’ve messed with/replaced would be both Lords/Great Lords, Necromancer, F Shaman&Druid, F Swordmaster, and F Assassin. For the Eirika (Great/)Lord, Swordmaster, and Assassin classes I also messed with the color palette (Ephraim Great/Lord and Necro were replaced as-is with no further modifications)

EDIT: thank you knabepicer for the fix, issue ended up being that I had an AP value on the custom map sprites that did not work with it. Changing it to a different one solved the issue :+1:

Gonna leave this topic open for other miscellaneous inquiries now so’s I don’t end up clogging anything with inane questions

2

You can create a report.7z in Builder from File → Create Report Issue, although it’s not too helpful at the moment since your account, being newly created, does not yet have permission to post links/images/files.

Anyways, in the moving map sprite editor (or “selected”, as you call it), what is the AP value for the sprite having the error? Can you confirm whether or not this is the same AP value you used when adding to a clean ROM?

3

Ah, noted.

Yes the AP value IS different on the rom where I tested the sprite sheet by itself with no other changes; as far as I can tell this is because on the original rom I uploaded a replacement moving map sprite to Eirika’s Great Lord class slot, while in the fresh rom I instead replaced Eirika Lord, since I wanted to check the sprite by itself as fast as possible rather than playing through the game to promote her or otherwise risking further complications by hacking her to lv10 with a promo item or w/e.

Exact AP values are 81C5E84 in the scuffed rom and 81C46CC in the fresh one.

So is the issue that it’s classified under a different animation category than the one I tested on the new rom, then? :thinking:

EDIT: I’m going to investigate this further by adding the custom map sprite in over the Eirika Lord sprite instead to see if it’s consistently not scuffed as it was in the unblemished rom

EDIT2: yep, confirmed, original worked-on rom has no issues with the map sprite in the AP for eirika’s lord. I assume if I just change that for the new sprite in the Great Lord class slot that’ll fix the issue?

EDIT3: I’ll be damned yep that did it. Much appreciated! Would definitely not have thought to mess with that on my own, thanks very much!

4

Small balancing question:

For vanilla Sacred Stones (let’s say hard mode if it matters), which of the following weapons is stronger overall (both are prf-locked Dark tomes with 30 uses and monster-slayer effects) :

  • 18 Mt | 90 Acc | 15 Wt | 10 Crit
  • 13 Mt | 90 Acc | 10 Wt | 20 Crit

I don’t usually try to mess around with balancing and such (not touching the rest of the game in terms of weapons and difficulty and whatnot), but in this one case I did want to stick one new thing into my rom that feels relatively unique and powerful compared to other Dark weapons on offer without being an instant steamroll button. (To that end I kinda like the second statline? sort of almost an FE7 Luna without being completely broken, almost?)

Another dark-magic related question:

Is there a way to port the magic animation for Apocalypse into an FE8 rom in FE Builder? :thinking: (I haven’t actually tried this yet may be about to answer my own question we’ll see–)

(EDIT: okay I think I kinda found an extension but it looks like I can only export the individual component sprites of the spell and not the whole thing haha… might be too daunting for me…)

5

Exporting and editing the vanilla spells is basically a non-starter (outside of some limited stuff), that’s why we have custom spell animation patches like CSA and people made ports of spells like Apocalypse for that patch (you can find these, like other visual assets, in the community graphics repository).