Recoloring Sprites

[Abacus]

In an effort to recolor some poke sprites for my Platinum ROM, I got a copy of pokeDSpic Plat and saved some pngs of poke sprites into an independent folder. I recolored them with GraphicsGale, then reloaded them in pokepic. The recolored sprites showed up just fine, but after I hit "Write to Narc," nothing happened. I'd close pokepic then re-open it, and it would display the standard colored sprites and not the edited ones. No error messages, no warnings, just a failure to permanently save.

As I kept playing around with it and trying to get it to work, I found that I could permanently save pngs that had only been recolored in MS Paint. The problem there is that Paint would only let me use colors that were already in the original sprite's palette. In the case of my Dratini, I was stuck recoloring using shades of blue and gray.

So, any idea what's going awry?

[aragornbird]

You need to replace the palettes and not just the sprites. The palette entries end in (48). They control what colors show up in the actual sprite. Replace the palettes first, then replace the sprites.

[Abacus]

Got it, thanks!

[Abacus]

Okay, I've got a new problem but I didn't want to waste space with a new thread. So here goes:

I wanted a more "earthy" Vibrava/Flygon, so I used the shiny Vibrava palette (attachment 1) to replace the regular Vibrava. I liked the way that the colors looked, so I tried to use the same palette on a shiny Flygon (att. 2). I did this by opening two copies of GraphicsGale, loading an image of Vibrava in one and Flygon in the other, selecting and copying the Flygon, then selecting the Vibrava in the other window and hitting paste. My result was attachment 3, and I was quite happy with it.

So, I go to pokeDSpic and select a "palette" Flygon (one of the ones labeled "48") and load the png of my modded Flygon in its place. The modded one looks just fine when I load it, but after I hit "write to Narc," all of the Flygon images start looking like an inverted mess - see attachment 4.

I can't make heads or tails of what went wrong, but I feel that it's worth mentioning that the discolored Flygons (but not their background) have a palette that is very similar - if not identical - to the .png that I modified and tried to insert.

All help appreciated! :grog:

Edit: Problem fixed by manually recoloring the sprite in question instead of simply dumping one image/palette onto another. Still kinda curious as to why, though...

Edited March 11, 2011 by Abacus

[aninymouse]

It has to do with the file that maps certain colors to certain coordinates. change the colors but not the coordinates and things get messed up. I've had sprites come out like your last one there, several times. Glad you got it ironed out. It's definitely a long process to get perfect sprites when you make drastic changes.

[Abacus]

Thanks aninymouse, good to know!