Decided to try out ROM hacking, and so far it’s been enjoyable, but something has happened to cause a generic enemy palette to glitch, leaving it looking rather unsightly. Any idea what could have caused this?
Could you provide any screenshots of this? Even if you have to upload them to imgur or someplace and link them. A visual issue is gonna be harder to diagnose without, well, the visual.
I know. What I didn’t know before hand is that because my account is new, I can’t post Images or Links. Once I have the trust level, I’ll post it in a reply.
Right, so this definitely looks like this unit is loading with a palette that isn’t designed for the Knight battle animations. I would check the unit slot you’re using for this enemy to see if they have a palette assigned for this class.
- In FE6 or 7, this would be the “Unpromoted Palette” in the Character Editor. In FE8, it would be in the Palette Editor (note that this is not the same as “Character Palette”!), and assigned for the Knight class specifically.
- Check the generic palette for the Knight class’s Lance animations in the Battle Animations editor.
For both of these, you particularly want to check the “Enemy” palette, since that’s what appears to be broken.
They were the first things I checked before posting here, there was no palette on the character, and it looks just fine on the battle animations editor.
While I was waiting to build trust level, I tested out relocating the Knight Class to a different hex code and that seemed to sort it out. However, I would still like to learn why this happened in the first place so that:
A. It doesn’t happen again
and B. So that if it does, I know how to fix it.
Okay, I’ve figured out what’s going on here, I think. FE7 and 8 (and possibly 6, too? Probably. I think it’s part of the handling for that game’s ballista animations) have special code that forces classes in the slots the vanilla game allots to the Archer and Sniper classes to use the generic palettes of those classes if the unit has no palette assigned for that class. Notably, this seems to grab the palette associated with the archer/sniper battle animation slots directly rather than going through the battle animation assignment table for those class slots, which is why you’re seeing this Knight loading with the generic enemy Sniper palette (which looks like garbage since it’s not meant for the Knight sprites at all).
There is a patch for this for FE8 at least (“Prohibit forcibly overwriting the archer’s combat animation palette” in the Patch tab), which you can install and carry on about your project if you’re using that game as a base, but I don’t know if FE7 or FE6 have similar patches made for them. It would probably be best to leave the Archer-line classes in their vanilla slots in the class list if one of those games is your base, honestly.
That fixed it! Thank you!