Adding a blinking eye animation for Laharl
Laharl doesn't have a blink animation when he is looking forward, he has only one when he is looking sideways. In this tutorial we will fix this!
End result:
Don't forget to make a backup of your files if something goes wrong!
You can use the File Manager to extract Laharl sprite sheet.
It is located inside SUBDATA.DAT\START.DAT\ANM00.DAT.
First open SUBDATA.DAT and decompress START.DAT into any target folder (this can take a while). Then open the decompressed START.DAT and extract ANM.DAT. Now open ANM.DAT and you should find Laharls sprite sheet, with the name 0001_LAHARL.SH, extract it and open it in the Sprite Sheet Editor.
The opened sprite sheet should look something like this:
The animation we want to edit is animation Nr.2, if you select it in the dropdown menu you should notice, in the Timeline, that it only has the lenght of one and just one keyframe. To add our blink animation, we need first to export the keyframe image so we can modify the eyes. For this we select the keyframe to read which Sprite (the ID) it uses. If you know the ID, then you can find the used Sprite in the Sprite view dock (if you have the keyframe selected it should also be highlighted blue) and export it as a color image with the right click menu.
The exported image you then can modify in your favorite image editing software like GIMP to create the keyframes.
NOTE: You can only use the 16 colors defined in the color table, so you can't add new colors. Also if you save a image make sure to save them uncompressed, if the colors are any different the sprite will not import back successfully!
For example I created two new sprites to make the animation smooth, one where the eyes are half open and one where the they are fully closed:
Now we need to add the crated sprite back in, but all of the sprite sheets are already full, so click the 'add a new empty sprite sheet' icon (
) to create a new sprite sheet (keep the values at default). Navigate to it and click the 'Create Sprite' icon (
) and select it and use the edit bar to position and resize it. Make sure it has the same size and uses the same color table (in this case 0) as the image you want to import. After you done, right click it and choose 'Import as color', if all goes right you should see your image. Repeat this until you have all of your images imported.
If not already done select the animation Nr.2 in the drop down list. Currently it is way too short, so with click and drop grab the right edge of the keyframe and expand it to 174 (you can shoose other values if you want). Afterwards split the one big keyframe with the right click menu at 162, 164 and 170. You should end up with 4 keyframes. Now you can select them and change the sprite ID to your new added sprites:
Note: At every frame there must be at least one keyframe defined, so if you want the export to be successful don't leave any gaps.
You are done! Export the Sprite sheet as a .SH file and insert it back simmilar to the extraction, just backwards.
Note: You don't need to compress the START.DAT back, the game can handle the file being uncompressed.