SaGa Frontier 2 Battle Sprites

[rufaswan]

Hi guys, I'm the sprite ripper for SaGa Frontier 2. And I've found the battle sprites for both party battle and duel battle, both monsters and party characters. That's pretty much everything.

But unfortunately unlike the walking sprites, they are in parts, and hence they need to be reassemble. So my questions are:

1) Is it OK for me to submit the sprites in HTML, or must it be PNGs only? They are reassemble with a css trick called CSS Image Sprites.

2) If they needs to be in PNGs, can I update my (already approved) submissions, or do I make a new section for them?

3) As I noticed, the character's duel battle have layers, meaning if the character holding a large weapon, like a bow, the lower body will display behind the weapon while the upper body is display on top of it. So how do you put in the sprite sheets?

4) Is there any rule about duplicated sprites? Does ever sprites needs to be unique to each other? I noticed there are some sprites are duplicated to used for different action, should those be removed too?



Here is the file with everything packed, in case you want to have a look at it:
(WARNING : it is 250MB+ unpacked !)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/gis1pyijyg...14-1541.7z

Thanks,
- Rufas

P.S. I noticed while my script was able to reassemble the sprites back, but some sprites are still broken (e.g. chr460 tail). If anyone can fix it up, you can just submit it directly yourself. Permission given.
I mean, my script already works for 1000+ sprites, fixing the script for these few and risk broke everything is just not worth the time.
If you are using Firefox, you can right-click -> Inspect Element to debug it. Hope that helps!

[Davy Jones]

1 - Pretty sure HTML is out of question. I would recommend PNG.
2 - As far as I can see, you ripped the overworld characters and now you want to submit the battle chars. Therefore I would make a new section.
3 - Can you make several versions? Like complete character animations + their parts? I made it like this: https://www.spriters-resource.com/playst...eet/66217/
4 - If you need to double sprites to play an animation correctly (for example frame 7 and 23 are identical), then I would add them. Btw, if you have one animation which plays for two or three actions, then you could note it on the sheet (Wood chopping/Using battle axe/Killing monster in cutscene). Or you don't add text at all and let the animations speak for themselves. But I would not put two identical animations on a sheet.

[puggsoy]

In addition to what Davy said, if you have two animations where one is identical but just flipped (like most games tend to do with walking left and right), only include one of them. Flipping is trivial for users to do and you may as well save the sheet space.

[rufaswan]

Thanks @Davy Jones and @puggsoy, those are great advices. I do not know what to do with (3) for now, but I'll figure something out later.

On that note, can anyone help to tag the character's name too? Especially for the bosses and monsters.

Also, can anyone confirm if this spritesheet is ever used in-game?

Unlike the rest, which are all decoded correctly, this is the only spritesheet that doesn't. They are not correctly aligned and some part just went over to the next sprite. I wonder if this is an unused graphic that can be added to The Cutting Room Floor?

Thanks,
- Rufas

[Zoroar]

Hi everyone !

@rufaswan Thank you for your work on SF2 ! This game is so beautiful and the chara-design so great

As the folder names you posted in the forum for overworld characters are the same than folder in the ISO of SF1 you seem to have access to the file of SF2.
I have an BIN/CUE image and when mounted there is just 3 files in there including a "SAGA2.IMG" that I can mount but not accessible, how did you do ?


I begin to extract the background with VRAM but it's so long.. You talk about decode so have you written a program to do the job directly ?
I have some base with python but have no idea about programing psx games

Hope you'll come back to the forum to answer me

Thanks,
Zoroar !

[rufaswan]

Wow! I don't know there was a reply here. And a new private message too! And I didn't get any email notifications at all! That's so weird. Good thing I came back to check once in a while.

@Zoroark Thanks for the reply. It is good to see some love to this game.

You can only see 3 files in there because it is the US version. Like FF8.IMG (Final Fantasy 8), the files are compressed and the original file names and directories were lost... BUT that's not in the JP version (SLPS 019.90), where everything is still there. That's the version I used.

At the mean time, I decoding other files too. So far, I think, I managed to get every images in the game. I'm talking about every sprites, objects, effects, backgrounds in the game. It is not organized for upload yet, but you can take a look here:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/f32m14ywa9...58.7z/file
(LARGE FILE WARNING : it has 1,517,443 PNGs and 6.2 GB unpacked!)

@Davy Jones as per your suggestion, all the sprites in BATTLE above is in PNGs too, along with some of them fixes (by figuring out a data structure).

It would be a great help if anyone can organize all the images as spritesheets (with correct names) and upload them to the site.

Thanks, and also Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2020.
- Rufas

[Dazz]

Looking at your archive there, you seem to have an immense number of duplicated files across the board. These can easily be removed through an application like Yet Another Duplicate File Remover... Should find some 200,000 duplicates in there.

[Magma MK-II]

Yeah, if you can at least reduce the file size we could take a look at it.

[rufaswan]

@Dazz I asked about those duplicated sprites on my OP, with the reply from Davy Jones, "4 - If you need to double sprites to play an animation correctly (for example frame 7 and 23 are identical), then I would add them."

So if you use a tool to blindly remove every duplicates, your spritesheet may not look right because some frames are skipped on an animation.

... Which is fine since we have a master/backup on MediaFire [link above]. If you think you need to add back some missing frames, you can always get them back from the archive.

@Magma Dragoon Do you mean the archive size is too big? MediaFire supports resume download, so you can use a download manager to download it over multiple days. There are no "file deleted for inactivity". My first file link still works fine even it is over 2 years ago. You can take your time.

Thanks,
- Rufas