Editing Fang's sprites in-game

[Dee]

So I'm making a mod that overhauls most of the game's sprites and textures to have a different theme, including the bosses. Problem is, after the 2.2.14/5 update, Fang's new sprites go almost completely unchanged when the mod is loaded, and no matter what I try to do (painstakingly re-replicating the SOC details from the wiki into one of the mod's SOCs included) something always looks wrong. I tested this issue with the 'Taz Mode' mod, and Daffy doesn't show unless the shooting animation plays (and even then it's only for a few split seconds). Does anyone at least have any advice here?

 

[CrawlaSupremacy]

So I'm making a mod that overhauls most of the game's sprites and textures to have a different theme, including the bosses. Problem is, after the 2.2.14/5 update, Fang's new sprites go almost completely unchanged when the mod is loaded, and no matter what I try to do (painstakingly re-replicating the SOC details from the wiki into one of the mod's SOCs included) something always looks wrong. I tested this issue with the 'Taz Mode' mod, and Daffy doesn't show unless the shooting animation plays (and even then it's only for a few split seconds). Does anyone at least have any advice here?

I think it's because Fang's boss sprites were merged into the playable version(?)

 

[InfernoMelon]

So I'm making a mod that overhauls most of the game's sprites and textures to have a different theme, including the bosses. Problem is, after the 2.2.14/5 update, Fang's new sprites go almost completely unchanged when the mod is loaded, and no matter what I try to do (painstakingly re-replicating the SOC details from the wiki into one of the mod's SOCs included) something always looks wrong. I tested this issue with the 'Taz Mode' mod, and Daffy doesn't show unless the shooting animation plays (and even then it's only for a few split seconds). Does anyone at least have any advice here?

Damn, I was literally having this same problem too... (this happens with Rosy Object & Metal Sonic (Boss) as well, at least on my end) I literally try the SOC method and using the player sprites as an base for it and it still didn't work (I blame the "removal" of the duplicate sprites in the Srb2.dat file in 2.2.15 for this...)

 

[Aquavine]

I have some info that might or might not be useful. So changing sprites for all the other bosses works fine. But it doesn't work for Fang, Rosy and M.Sonic. And there's a single thing that all of the objects have in common. They all are based off playable characters. And it seems that both the sprites in srb2.pk3 AND characters.pk3 have the same sprites. Like with Fang for example:

The green one is from characters.pk3, and the colored one is from srb2.pk3. Yet there's absolutely no reason for that sprite to be present in the characters.pk3 (The folder for playable variants) seeing how Fang never uses this sprite in his playable version. (And yes, I already tried replacing sprites in both folders... it didn't work... but maybe y'all will have more luck... :C)

And I have an "OBJECTION!" moment because the Rosy sprite folder in srb2.pk3... actually uses the OLD sprites! So this "proves"(?) my theory of Srb2 using the player sprites for cameo characters. But I don't really know what to do with this now...

I mean in terms of gamedev, then it would make sense to do this to safe space (And maybe sprite slots?), but in terms of an open-source project that's free for everyone to edit, then it just makes it harder to achieve something that was easy back then. And the sprites folder is right there free to use... :C

And I also tried making two pk3's named "srb2" and "characters" exactly the same as the main game data, and I tried doing it that way. Yet it still didn't work... This has to be some anti-modding scheme fr fr... (At this point I just want to ask someone from STJR to know how that works and if there's even a possible way to replace these sprites... :C I bet that if I would even modify this game to it's CORE... the only thing unchanged would be these sprites... -_- But the character sprite theory might have something to it...)

 

[CrawlaSupremacy]

I have some info that might or might not be useful. So changing sprites for all the other bosses works fine. But it doesn't work for Fang, Rosy and M.Sonic. And there's a single thing that all of the objects have in common. They all are based off playable characters. And it seems that both the sprites in srb2.pk3 AND characters.pk3 have the same sprites. Like with Fang for example:
View attachment 160050View attachment 160051
The green one is from characters.pk3, and the colored one is from srb2.pk3. Yet there's absolutely no reason for that sprite to be present in the characters.pk3 (The folder for playable variants) seeing how Fang never uses this sprite in his playable version. (And yes, I already tried replacing sprites in both folders... it didn't work... but maybe y'all will have more luck... :C)

And I have an "OBJECTION!" moment because the Rosy sprite folder in srb2.pk3... actually uses the OLD sprites! So this "proves"(?) my theory of Srb2 using the player sprites for cameo characters. But I don't really know what to do with this now...

I mean in terms of gamedev, then it would make sense to do this to safe space (And maybe sprite slots?), but in terms of an open-source project that's free for everyone to edit, then it just makes it harder to achieve something that was easy back then. And the sprites folder is right there free to use... :C

And I also tried making two pk3's named "srb2" and "characters" exactly the same as the main game data, and I tried doing it that way. Yet it still didn't work... This has to be some anti-modding scheme fr fr... (At this point I just want to ask someone from STJR to know how that works and if there's even a possible way to replace these sprites... :C I bet that if I would even modify this game to it's CORE... the only thing unchanged would be these sprites... -_- But the character sprite theory might have something to it...)

I said that too!
...Right?
Well, at least the player sprite thing.
This is good for other mods bc they don't need to create their own recolorable sprites, as the game already has them now on the vanilla chars, and Rosy cameo's sprites are outdated because why update them if playable Amy has it?
But, why not keep both?

 

[Aquavine]

I said that too!
...Right?

You did, but I did more yapping... And maybe added more details too. Like the sprites folder still having the boss and Rosy sprites, even though they aren't used. (At least that's sure for Rosy. Not sure for the bosses.)

 

[Aquavine]

After some experimenting and asking around, I finally managed to crack down the code! ^v^​

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So here's what I found out. All of these objects use a specific SpriteName which is S_PLAY, which means that they use the sprites of the actual player sprites. And they also use another also specific SpriteFrame which is SPR2_XXXX and the X's are the name of the action, so SPR2_WAIT for example. And all of that means that these objects use Skins instead of regular sprites, so if you were to make a custom skin AND then replace the used skin with the custom one then you could replace the sprites of these objects... And that's what I did with the help from SRB2 Discord server. :3 (Mainly the lua part.)

So here's how it works exactly
1. Snatch the specific character folder from "character.pk3" with both folders,
2. Edit the sprites to your liking (But not all of them! Only the ones that the object actually uses! So delete the unused ones.)
3. Edit S_SKIN to only include the line "name = [yourname]" this will cause a new skin to get created that will use the edited sprites,
4. Edit the lua script with your skin's name and the object being edited (1st and 6th line of the lua)
5. Yipee! Now you can self-insert your OC's into vanilla SRB2. :>

But I already made an example/preset PK3 that will make the process way easier. All of this was way easier to pull off than expected honestly.​