View my reply below.
It could save you time.
Original post:
Thanks to @7743 adding a new feature of febuilder, we can now easily throw in maps or images from other games into our hacks.
With great power comes great responsibility
Limitations:
- 512x512 image.
- 32x32 map size.
- 5 palettes of 16 as usual.
Additional details
The final generated object image is 256x256 size. If tiles are not repeated in your image, you’ll be restricted to just a 16x16 sized map.
Step 1.
Select a map
I’ve chosen the Blackjack from FFVI, ripped by Ryan914, and Tonberry2k, who I’ll then credit in my project. There are many to be found on the spriters-resource.
Step 2.
Align
Many of these resources are combined images, so you’ll have to crop it and then align the whole image such that the 16x16 pixel tiles will be where a unit would stand on them. Luckily most retro games use 16x16 pixels for tiles, but if yours doesn’t, good luck.
I open the image in GraphicsGale, copy part of it below as it exceeds 32 tiles in one direction, and set the canvas size to be 512x512. You may find the Custom-Grid and possibly the Snap feature to be useful.
Snap
If you managed to align it nicely, the rest should be easy.
Step 2.5. (Optional)
Colour reduce
Results when skipping step 2.5
(Not as vibrant in this case. Your results may vary depending on the colour reduction methods you use. Another test image produced seemingly identical results.)
I continue using GraphicsGale here, but Usenti is another great choice for colour reduction.
From here on out, we’re using FEBuilder now.
Step 3
Decrease Color Tool
This sets up the palette in the way that FEBuilder needs it to be.
Step 4 (Optional)
Expand the plist
Warning:
Pointing a plist entry incorrectly will destroy your rom, with FEBuilder’s lint feature immediately reporting thousands of errors. Please make a backup of your rom before changing plist entries. It is safe as long as you make a backup beforehand.
Change Map Style
They should all be unused plist and have different numbers.
I also set the tile animation to 0. Animations are not covered in this guide.
Finally, we just hit ‘Write to ROM’.
Now you’re ready to add in new maps/tilesets.
Errors
Please note that FEBuilder will report a few errors until the next step, as currently it’s a blank map that you would be playing on. Do not worry, this is normal.
Step 5.
Import your map
If you skipped step 4, you must overwrite an existing tileset.
Let's overwrite
Note that the various duplicates are simply re-palettes of the tileset. Changing Fields3 will change all your Fields.
LINT will no longer show errors.
Step 6.
Set the terrain
Everything is considered ‘Plains’, so now we must choose what FE8 terrain each tile will be.
This can be a bit tedious, but you can select each tile and choose the terrain type for it.
Additional possible methods
- I’ve heard there is a way to do this with Tiled. MisakaMikoto has included instructions in this thread on it, with the header
Edit the terrain info. To do: see if I can get this method to work as a quicker way to edit the terrain. If anyone has any resources on editing the terrain of a tile config, please let me know so I can add it to this guide.
Found this Tileset image to FEBuilder script thread by @feels
This script converts a PyxelEdit XML tilemap file into an FEBuilder MAPCHIP_CONFIG file. The script can also incorporate terrain and palette data from a TMX file, as long as the TMX file has tilesets named ‘paletteData’ and ‘terrainData’ and the TMX shares the same filename as the XML file.
It might be easier to work in a program like Tiled where you can presumably set the terrain for a bunch of selections at once, so I am including a link to the thread for now.
Conclusion
And there we have it. We are no longer forced to contend with the regular limitations of tilesets.
Live your dreams.
Yes it does, Kirb. Yes it does.
Huge thank you to 7743 for adding this feature to FEBuilder.
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