Pony Wars Advance

Minor update.

Trixie (New)

So I remade one of the first artworks for this ever.

Such enthusiasm. If only I could muster that much motivation, I'll try though.

It's true, I haven't been active at all. This becomes very evident when you consider that this blog was started one year and a few days ago.

Latest piece of artwork for the hack. Remember that this is upscaled, the original is only half the size.

So, I did this:

Don't worry, Pony Wars Advance will not feature OC characters.

This was basically the reason for my delayed updates recently: I was trying stuff, like (manual) anti-aliasing and more advanced shading.

While this picture will not be included in the hack, it is kind of important for future decisions concerning the artstyle of Pony Wars Advance.

While I have been focusing on pixel art for most of the time, editing the text is also something I decided to look into recently. For testing, I changed AJ's description a little:

The description here doesn't make alot of sense, but it was useful to figure out how many characters fit into each line. Turns out that it depends on the amount of pixels each of them has in width, so I zoomed in a little and figured out the exact amount of each letter:

2px:

I i l

3px:

[] (Space)

4px:

j t

5px:

b c e f g h k n o p q r s u y

6px:

A B C D E F G H J K L N O P Q R S T U V X Y Z a d m v w x z

8px:

M W

Each line can have a total of 106 pixels in width, which should give an average of about 20 characters per line.

(Tumblr resize blurs this quite a bit)

So, I have been working on this one for the past two days, but I can't seem to finish ist quite yet. Main problem has been the tail, I still have no idea on how to do it properly. I'd rather move on to the next sprite than to force myself to finish this one, frankly. Purpose of this post was to let you know that this project is not dead yet.

I did get lucky though: I'm at 12 colors right now, so I still have enough left to shade every color of her mane. Just barely.

First of all, thank you for asking, you're actually the first one yet.

I don't exactly get what you mean by blank CO Information Screen. Are you talking about the Screen that gives a description of each character? If so, then the text can be replaced without much of a hassle with a little hex-editing.

I also can't really delay the decision of what Ponies I will put into this, it's one of the first things that has be done; And since I'm already working on this, waiting for another 4 months just for some basic ideas doesn't sound all that efficient, sorry.

It's not exactly easy to decide which Characters can be used. They need to be diverse enough in gameplay and have to make at least some sense in terms of story. On top of that, I have to consider the limits Advance Wars 2 has.

Just finished this sprite for my project. Turned out way better than Big Mac, I think.

16 colors, 128x160px.

Feel free to use, but don't claim it as your own.

I used this as reference.

You know what I've also never really done before? Spriting.

The last 3 days were occupied by a single Sprite, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. Anyway, here it is:

Reference

(Tumblr's resize blurs the picture a little, be sure to enlarge it)

Now that I have established what this blog and this project will be all about, let's get to our first lesson in romhacking. I'll document everything (or mostly everything) that I'm doing to this game, which might help some people who want to get into romhacking themselves, or those who are simply interested for whatever reason, plus I can use this as some kind of open notepad for myself, should I ever need to.

One of the easier things to do while hacking a rom is to change the graphics, so for today, we'll be putting the picture I posted yesterday into the game.

First, we'll need some tool to find the place to insert them, compress them into a format that can be read by the GBA, and to change the pallette accordingly. Nintenlords GBA Graphics Editor can do all that (originally designed for Fire Emblem, usable for most GBA games), and it works perfectly.

So, the first thing we well do is to look up what format the picture we want to exchange has. In this case, it is the complete picture of Andy, found at position 303 and 322:

The picture is scrambled up though, we'll have to edit our version like that as well (this is generally only required for larger pictures).

The format is 128px*160px, so let's head to gimp and resize Applebloom a bit.

going from this...

..to this:

Since the original picture was a little to wide, I had to edit the tail a little. The cutoff at the bottom is not an issue, since the AW2 pictures do the same.

after splicing it together, we get 2 pictures:

and 

Now, we just need to insert them. To do that, we'll have to go to the image we want to replace (in this case, 303 and 322) and choose "Import Bitmap" (usable formats are BMP and PNG). You will see this new window:

"Import Graphics" has to be checked (you can uncheck it if you're only inserting a palette).

"Abort if new Graphics are bigger than old" should be checked if the image is being put in the same place as the old one (unless you really know what you are doing). For pictures bigger than the old one, you can choose a different, preferably empty space on the rom. In AW2 case, the space from 700000 to 7FFFFF is completly free.

"Repoint graphic pointers" has to be checked when using a different Offset than the old picture, like 700000. But it doesn't hurt to check it even if the same offset is used.

Warning: usually, "Import palette" is checked with the offset "0". That means that the picture's palette will be put right at the start of the games code, screwing up the booting process and making the rom unplayable. Should be unchecked unless you know where the palette is located (more about that later).

I already added the offset for Andy's original Palette, E4500. Therefor, we can import Appleblooms palette to prevent her from having really strange colors.

After importing both files and saving our new rom, lets go for a testrun to see if everything worked out fine.

Well, except for the remaining portrait of Andy (There are more than one image to replace) and that we somehow turned Max into a phantom(I kinda know what happend), everything seems to be in order.

Adding this picture was surprisingly easy for various reasons.

For one, it was already designed as a 16-bit picture (It only used 16 colors with a depth of 15 bit(I'll explain later)), So I did not have to change any of that. Kudos to Pixmeister!

Reason #2 is that the picture itself was upscaled at some point, probably about 200% of the original size. Thus, downscaling it did not decrease the quality at all, which turned out great and saved me alot of work.

Glad you found this blog, however that happened.

Since I don't know how much you all know about Advance Wars, ponies or romhacking, I intend to give a short overview of all 3 aspects, starting with the forementioned game, Advance Wars.

Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy game first released for the Gameboy Advance in 2001 (hence it's called Advance Wars) by Nintendo's sub-developer Intelligent Systems, who are also responsible for the probably more popular Fire Emblem franchise, which is not all that different.

Basically, the point of the game is to use various types of units like infantry, tanks, planes, artillery or ships efficiently to beat your opponent. Some missions require you to use a set amount of pre-determined units, others give you the chance to deploy them yourself using funds earned by captured cities, which supply the player with additional money each turn. Each game has a campaign mode and various trial maps to play against the AI, providing enough single player content, and, of course, a multiplayer mode which can be played with multiple people.

Romhacking has been an important aspect of gaming communities since pretty much forever. It's mostly done to translate games that have never made the trip overseas (mostly japanese titles), a popular example being Mother 3, the sequel to the Nintendo RPG Earthbound.

Translating, however, is not everything that can be achieved by hacking a rom. Sites like SMWcentral, a popular romhacking-site for the SNES game Super Mario World, have many people who are working on ways to enhance the gaming experience of the original title, often times changing practically every aspect of the game, like graphics, music, leveldesign, gameplay mechanics and text.

As a rule of thumb, the more popular the game is among hackers, the easier it gets to hack the game yourself. The forementioned Super Mario World is probably the most easily hackable game out there, simply because people who are much smarter than me were able to build tools which make hacking certain games easy as pie, in case of SMW, Lunar Magic.

And, lucky like I sometimes am, certain people who love the Advance Wars series even more than I do have already developed tools to help some poor guy like me, who has never really hacked a game, out. Although many of the tools are usable for pretty much all GBA-games, I would definatly not be able to get much done without them.

Now, before you shake your head and turn away, now that I've said that this is a first time for me, I've been experimenting a whole bunch, figuring out what goes and what doesn't in a potential romhack of Advance Wars 2, and that I believe that I have all the pieces to successfully start this project together already, which I will explain in a future post. Just, believe me that I'm serious about this.

Sooo... I think I got a little off track here. The most important alteration I'll do in this hack is to replace all the existing characters (Commanding Officers) with, well, characters from the TV-show My little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Call me crazy, but I personally blame this picture for everything.

After I tried adding this pony here, Applebloom (done by this artist), into the game and succeded (surprisingly), My plan was set.