Astonishia Story (PSP) - How to get the graphics?

[daemoth]

Woot
First part looks alright at least

[Davy Jones]

Unfortunately, it doesn't. It is way too bright, the ingame graphics are nothing like this:

[daemoth]

I never that kind of problem with my project... 
Hmm, maybe that area has an overlay that darken the map?  Did you check if the other area were the same?

[Davy Jones]

No area in the game has an overlay, this also happens to the other locations in the game. Every single image is brighter than it should be.

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whoa I found the solution. If you open the tilesets in a graphics program like PhotoFiltre, you can clearly see there is an image mask on the picture.

And if I open it with an old program like Paint Shop Pro 5, the effect is gone and I can put it on another sheet to get rid of the image mask.

Nice =D

[daemoth]

Interesting. What were you using  to open the file at first? Gimp?

[Davy Jones]

Windows Picture Viewer and the tileset viewer of PPSSPP, I didn't use a graphics program to open them first.

Btw, the emulator has a fantastic debugger (Debug - GE Debugger) which clears every single sprite from the maps. Definitely uploading some stuff later.

[daemoth]

Nice! Weird thing is, ive never been able to use Ppsspp's debugger cause it always make the emulator crash on my end.

[Davy Jones]

Same happens to me, but only if I use CTRL+G. When I select the debugger from the dropdown menu, it works fine. So far, it only crashed once with this method and that's still good enough to make map rips in addition to the tilesets.

[Davy Jones]

Ripping is making progress, I even found out that the weird bright "fog" on the tilesets is actually alpha transparency and that you can disable it per PhotoFiltre or any other newer graphics program.

The way Glintercept rips animations is, well, it is okay, but not very good. You have no guarantee that all frames are there so you have to double-check with Animget and also the order of the animation frames is random, so you have to double-check that as well.

Also sometimes you have memory issues (like the debugger crashes) but also with the ripping. I noticed multiple times that Glintercept denies catching screenshots/sprites/tilesets. There is only a folder and a log file in it. Thankfully restarting solves the problem.

All in all, it's very good as a map ripper and the best thing if any other sprite-/tile-ripping-method fails.

[daemoth]

On some game, its far easier:

[Davy Jones]

I hope this is how Black Sigil sheets will look like.

Anyway, did some ripping:
http://www.spriters-resource.com/psp/astonishstory/

I made a couple of quicksaves (.ppst-files), the names are like ULUS10083_1.02_1.ppst, ULUS10083_1.02_2.ppst and so on, but putting them in memstick-PSP-PPSSPP_STATE doesn't do anything.

Is there a way to get these quicksaves to work?

[daemoth]

Make a normal save file and rename the downloaded one so they have the same prefix. Thereafter my emulator was able to see them.
Btw, jappanese save game work on Us game.
Edit: Oh, your speaking about save state? never tried to download those, only the normal saves.

[Davy Jones]

Ah I see, you have to save them in a separate folder. Plus, you can acutally name them how you want like "1 Iringis Village before Trumman dies".
And if you want to use them, you have to manually load them from your separate folder.

Btw, if you quicksave now while using your imported save state, the file in the separate folder is unaffected. Saving only changes the files in the memstick folder of PPSSPP.

[Davy Jones]

Ugh, this was unconvenient.

I use PPSSPP's GE debugger and SnagIt 8.0 to screenshot maps from where my main character stands. Now I noticed that the emulator has apparently performance issues even in small rooms after comparing two screenshots. These issues produce multiple vertical ripple lines which swallow some pixels on their path and go straight through the whole screenshot. What I did now was changing back to the normal Windows version (32-Bit), using the fastest render mode (unpuffered) and changing the window size from 2x to 1x. Now the screenshots are all okay again, but I will definitely check my existing rips if something's not right. Fortunately, I made all map sheets in a 8x8 grid for quick comparisons.

Also tried a new method on how to beat this annoying alpha transparency + the black background colour on the tilesets as fast as possible:

First steps
1. Download & install PhotoFiltre, a freeware-graphics program.
2. Open the tileset.
3. First task bar - Layer - Transparency - Edit Alpha Channel

Working on the image "Background (Mask)"
4. Now you have a separate picture which is called "Background (Mask)" and consists of the colours grey and black.
5. First task bar - Adjust - Replace colour - Put the tolerance on 0 and replace the black colour with another one, like pink or green.
6. Click on the multi-coloured box in the 2nd task bar (Indexed colours) -> 256 colours.
7. First task bar - Image - Transparent colour - choose the grey as transparency colour

Working on the tileset
8. First task bar - Layer - Transparency - Disable Alpha Channel
9. Now you mark the whole "Background (Mask)" image, copy or cut it and past it on the tileset

Congratulations, the tileset is complete. Why I did all this: Some parts of the tilesets have black outlines, if you just disable alpha transparency and change the black background colour into pink, you literally "kill" the tiles because a part of them vanishes into the said pink.


Note: If you open PhotoFiltre for the first time, two things are extremely annoying and can be deactivated like this:
* First task bar - View - LayerTumbnail - Hide
* First task bar - Tools - Image Explorer