Arena Ultimax Sprites

[Skyla Doragono]

All right, now that the easy stuff that I can do and/or figure out is out of the way for this game, it's time for the rest. I'm going to do one thing at a time until I get to the end, so this topic may still be going on for awhile.

Starting with the data for the bustups I've found: it seems there's two files working together here. One is a .DDS file that when converted, produces this image (the original .DDS prepped for viewing/converting in Noesis can be found here; you just need to change the extension back to .dds to get how it was in the compressed .pac file). The other file is .hip file that doesn't work with Ploaj's program from earlier in the thread, and trying to view it in Hipster comes back with an error that says "TGA: couldn't allocate memory." I honestly think it probably could view it, but it seems to be too big for the program to handle.

I think what's going on is the .hip file is the "clean" image, and the .DDS file is an overlay that adds the effects we see in the game to it.

Any ideas?

EDIT: A little more googling, and I found someone that's having a similar issue with a different Arksys game, but no resolution. I'm going to keep looking, but any ideas would be helpful.

[Skyla Doragono]

I'm just... gonna post again stupid spam account go away.

So bbtools was something someone found while trying to help me with this, but I'm not exactly sure what it's trying to do, or what setup I need to make it do what the page claims it's supposed to do.

Can someone take a look at this and point me in the right direction?


EDIT: PROGRESS!

It looks like exah3pac will actually work with these files, as in I just drag the file over and it works. It's not giving me the right pallet though, as you can see here.

As fabulous as Adachi is in pink, I can't upload without the right pallet lmao; how can I get the right one to show, other than manually fixing it?

[puggsoy]

Well I whipped up a converter for this, just so that I can experiment with some stuff myself - using TiledGGD and such doesn't work because it's RLE compressed.

However at this point I can't find a better way to read the given palette. The skin is correct so I'm not sure why the rest of the colours are wrong, any change of colour order makes the skin screw up (and doesn't really fix anything else). Kinda stumped.

I see in your submission thread that you found other palettes and edited the images by hand, could you tell me where you got those?

[Skyla Doragono]

Got those from the fighter sprites; they're the same exact ones. Here the one that will work with the samples above.

I ran into this problem with Rise; most of her sprites had a weird pallet programmed in with the graphic, so I couldn't get them to work with Ploaj's extractor, but they did come up in Hipster. I believe these files would work the same way, but they're seriously too huge for Hipster to process.

[puggsoy]

Weird... can you send me the file(s) in question for Rise? I honestly can't find any connection between the correct palette and the weird one within the file. Worst case I can just make a program that takes an external palette that you specify though.

[Skyla Doragono]

Sorry for the delayed response.

Here's a zip of some of Rise's HIP files, and here is the main image pack and pallet pack so you can load them up in Hipster and see what I mean.

[puggsoy]

Well I see what you mean, but exah3pac and my program also convert Rise's .hip files with the colours Hipster does:



So even if Hipster worked with the huge files, the "default palette" option would still produce pink-haired Adachi. It doesn't do anything special with the palette.

[Skyla Doragono]

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

But if you load both Rise's main sprite and her pallet in Hipster, you'd be able to change it to the right pallet, like I had to do for the majority of her sprites. That's why I think these cutins would work the same way if they weren't too big for Hipster to handle.

[puggsoy]

Oh, well... that's not hard to do. I can make something that could convert all .hip files (at least of this huge format) in a folder with a given .hpl, would that suit your needs? Or would you need a preview of the palette to check which is the correct one?

[Skyla Doragono]

Nah, no preview needed; [Character ID]00_00.hpl is always the main pallet file, so something that can look for that is perfect.

[puggsoy]

Awesome Could you send me a couple more just for testing purposes?

[Skyla Doragono]

Okay, here's the rest of Adachi's stuff:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/y9ey59...ce_ad1.hip
http://www.mediafire.com/download/8emaj2...igeki0.hip
http://www.mediafire.com/download/m1yqrc...igeki1.hip

That plus the one above is basically everything that's in one of these cutin packs as far as .hip files. Let me know if you need others.

[puggsoy]

Well I'm able to (albeit somewhat hackily) relate bastup_ad1.hip and face_ad1.hip to the palette file but the ichigeki ones don't contain the "ad" so I can't look for the .hpl file for those. If you want I could just make it look for some file ending in "00_00.hpl" and convert all the .hip files in the same directory using that. I can't think of a better way to do this.

[Skyla Doragono]

Okay, that sounds best. I can't wait to try it out.

[puggsoy]

Here you go, sorry for the delay.

Code:

Usage: hip2png inDir outDir
   inDir: A folder containing the .hip files to convert
   outDir: The folder to save the converted files to

Right now it just works as I said, it converts the files in the chosen folder using a file ending with "00_00.hpl" in the same folder (I just noticed a small bug that makes it the last instead of the first but ideally you should only have one anyway). Because I am now able to read and understand C code and hence the source of exah3pac, I plan to make this a general HIP conversion tool down the line, but for now it just works like this.

But anyway yeah, tell me if you have any issues.