The VG Resource

I took it upon myself to try to rip some of the Genesis Strike series. But I will not hog this all to myself. If anyone else wants to help out, leave me specifics so we don't work on the same sprites and waste each other's time.

For a useful guide to how to possibly rip the Strike series, notorious for its crappy graphics and even crappier tiling, check out this thread I wrote: http://new.spriters-resource.com/communi...?tid=12031

I'm currently at the time of this post working on the main helicopter in Urban Strike, so don't touch that one. I'm over halfway done. Even have the helicopter's weapons ripped. For anyone who wants to help, here's something I've noticed about Urban Strike's sprites and possibly the rest of the series as well. Player vehicles (aircraft, hovercraft, motorbike, et al) may follow a similar format:

*There are 24 directions of movement -- the four cardinal directions and five more between each of those.
*When the aircraft are flying straight, angles 15 thru 75 are probably mirrors of 105 thru 165. Likewise angles 195 thru 255 are probably mirrors of 285 thru 345.
*When the aircraft are flying straight, the vehicle sprites of 0 and 180 degrees may be mirrors, but it's best to assume they're unique when ripped with their respective shadows.
*When turning left or right, all angles EXCEPT 90 and 270 are probably mirrors of the opposite direction. Angles 90 and 270 must be ripped individually.
*There are a LOT of sprites for each vehicle, especially the aircraft -- turning left/right while hovering, hovering level, turning left/right while in reverse, reversing level, turning left/right while accelerating (the hardest one to capture), accelerating level, turning left/right while advancing, advancing level.

Also bear in mind no two Strike games are exactly alike graphically. I peresonally feel the Genesis version is superior. There appears to be some faulty recoloring and a few sprite differences in the SNES version. The GBA version is probably closer to the SNES version than the Genesis version. But yeah, I'm ripping the Genesis version which is a pain in the patut. If you really do want to rip the SNES version, my guide I linked to at the top of this post can be used just as well, since the SNES version is a port of the Genesis one and has the same crappy usage of tiles.

Oh, and one more thing to bear in mind if anyone tries ripping the Strike series:

I don't know if it's in the earlier ones, but in Urban Strike, designers included reference point pixels in some of their sprites. If you zoom in on a rotorless helicopter, you'll see an off-color pixel. In the case of the Mohican, there is a single yellow pixel. That's the pivotal reference point. When you make your sheets (or when I make them if no one's going to pitch in), line that pixel up at the same point every time. If those yellow pixels don't line up, then you didn't do your sprite sheet properly. Other sprites are harder to line up, so look for references (like the bullet hit effect I ripped, I shot at a bunker and used the bunker as a stationary reference).

I once tried ripping from Desert Strike, but EA is brilliant at graphical efficiency. Because of this, I raged at the graphics.
Good luck with your attempt at ripping, this was all I could get before going insane:

I saw that. Someone also mentioned you when I mentioned my trick to ripping the graphics in Kega.

I'm doing it the old fashioned way. Screenshots. However, Kega has a nice step-advance function using the INS key, which on my laptop is right next to the arrow keys, so I can just advance. It takes a while, though. It's slow. It's painful. But that way I know I'm getting the sprites I need. So yeah, no "unused" sprites.

I tried ripping by tiles, which were nice in that they seemed to have 2 or 3 going at once, but I couldn't make heads nor tails of how to put them together. So yeah, I settled for screen caps. And don't blame EA, blame the programmers. They had never made a game before Desert Strike and the graphics were made on a computer with a 3D modeler. They didn't have Nintendo's guidance since they programmed for Sega, so they didn't know how to program efficiently.

Blagh! While ripping I realized something. What I thought was the pivot pixel wasn't. Or if it was, the rotors change location depending on the angle. So rather than place each rotor in relation to each angle, I'm going to have to realign everything. This ripping project just stole an extra 50% of my valueless time.

Okay, so I've FINALLY figured out a workable guideline for ripping aircraft in the Strike series, one I'm hoping will apply to all the games.

Aircraft seem to have a pivot pixel -- a little yellow dot of seemingly no other use. However, aligning the sprites according to the pivot pixel would require aligning every frame of the rotors to each frame of the helicopters. As this would be overly tedious as stated in the opening post, I decided to try aligning everything according to the centers of the rotors. In doing so, I noticed the shadows are always aligned with the rotors regardless of the aircraft's pitch or roll. Knowing this, ripping the sprites without the rotors (using my method described in another thread in another subforum here) and with the shadows, it should be safe to sort the sprite sheets by keeping all the shadows in their proper alignment.

Thus, the proper steps for ripping aircraft from the Strike series could be:

1) Save a state.
2) Open state in YYCHR and fill all background tiles with one non-black color.
3) Load the edited state (do not close YYCHR!).
4) Rip one full set (24 frames) of each direction, regardless of pitch or roll.
5) Build a mini-sheet for those 24 frames keeping the rotors in the same relative position.
6) If possible in your graphics program, promote the mini-sheet to a new layer.
7) Go back to YYCHR and fill all tiles for the rotors.
8) Load the revised state and proceed with ripping frames.
9) Paste each new frame into the mini-sheet's file in a new layer and align each frame according to the mini-sheet's shadows
-OR-
Using the mini-sheet as a reference, paste each new frame into a file separate from the mini-sheet and align the shadows properly.


I actually tried something similar once and forgot all about it, but I think this will actually keep everything in proper alignment. This is why even though I'm 99% done with my first sprite sheet (well, 2nd if you count the one above), I still have one more day of work left on it -- I have to realign all 288 frames. >_<;;