menu.pal. Don't remember where I got it from or if it was from a screenshot or what.

:o ...

EDIT:

the smiley isn't working =\

OK.. so I didn't get around to doing the grid thing today..

I worked on a PHP J2T->PNG converter.. perhaps J2O can let you preview tileset downloads? Bobby and I will be discussing, I'm sure.

Um..wow !...these collections are great guys. Nullified alot of my by-hand-ripping but never mind !

The era of ripping is over, the era of extraction has begun.

I can now retire from sprite ripping and work on my toenail art.

I shall retire form procrastinating on ripping, and go work on Jazz Y some more instead.

:O your really gonna fisnish jazz Y :p

I've already mentioned 2-3 times I am INDEED WORKING ON JAZZ Y.

People stop treating Jazz Y news(whereever I slip it in) as Christmas Day. "Wow he's actually working on it? Goodgollygosh!"

Anyone want to suggest the best system for putting sprites on a sprite sheet?

Ways I can think of:

1) find the max width and height of any frame of a set of anims (e.g. the "jazz" set, the "bilsy" set, the "weapons" set..) and make a grid of cells that size.

or

2) place a sprite in the top left, gap of like a pixel, next sprite, repeat, until the width is filled, then start on next line down far enough that it won't touch the above sprites (i.e. a crude closest packed system..)


Other questions:
How much padding between sprites?
Should the sprites be centered in the imaginary cells, or aligned to top-left or whatever corner?
Should there be bounding boxes drawn around them?
What color background?
How wide should the sprite sheet be? A constant, or around the width to make the entire sheet close to a square?
Should I also export a txt file giving the coordinates of each sprite? What format would be useful to fangame programmers?

Last night I ripped close to all of the sprites I had (only the anims in the shareware version, I don't have access to the full version at school (I'll get my brother to send it to me from home though)).. (like 3500+) and it took around 20 seconds.. certainly makes the by hand ripping look slow.. ;p

I think 1 would be a pretty good system.

1 would probably be best for when people use it and make animations and whatnot.

I could probably also string all the frames of a set together into an animated gif.. the format doesn't look too hard, especially since we did the LZW algorithm in school a while back, so...

But then again each set has a number of sequences.. maybe if I get around to finishing the rest of the J2A file I'll find where the beginnings/ends of these sequences are...

Oh well.. I'm getting ahead of myself again.

Sprite sheets are more useful to work with manually when frames of a particular animation are grouped together and seperated from other animations -- like one animation sequence on a row. Optimizing your extraction for fangames to use would be different because you want to try to pack them in as tightly as possible, and also have a way to lookup the animation set, locations, sizes, and offsets for all of the frames. It might be best to let fangames deal with how to arrange that themselves. Maybe just make a text file with any of that data that exists in the j2a file. Background should be color index 0, I think. I don't know about padding between frames.

Windows Explorer now generates thumbnails for the bitmaps, which is nice. Paint still can't open them, but I suspect that's because it just doesn't support top-down bitmaps. They seem fine in most everything else.

OK. I'll take all of this stuff into account.

And note that I've located how to tell how to separate the sets of anims into sequences (e.g. instead of just the "dog" set, there is dog-attack and dog-walk... ), so that's a step in the right direction..

EDIT: and... I found a little bug in the code.. was incrementing a variable twice, so now I have roughly double the number of frames I had before (on the order of 6500..) (note that the jazz frames and heads I uploaded earlier are unaffected by this.. they're all there)

EDIT2: and thanks for the palette unknown. worked great.

6500 frames?

Dear lord, if anyone ever customizes them all I'll eat my hat!

That would be SO useful for a certain project I'm working on at the moment. Will it be open-source?

TSF brings the total to 7090.. I'll try to release sprite sheets by the end of the week, but I make no guarantees...

I dunno.. I'll probably follow Dr. Eggman's lead with his J2B file work by documenting the file format and providing only really basic code so that only people who know what they're doing will be able to make use of it. PM me if you think I may be able to help you with your project though..

:O wow lots of frames

By the end of the week? O.o

yeah.. I already had all of the sprites extracted in 1 frame per BMP (like the Jazz and "Heads" bitmaps I linked to earlier).. it was fun scrolling through the thumbnails of them.. fake animation ;p I just need to write some code to lay them out nicely. It's not difficult.. I can probably reuse code I made to rearrange tiles in tilesets/level previews for this purpose.. it's just I don't have a ton of free time to sit down and get it done for the next couple days..

Anyway, for like 24 hours I'll leave this up: zip file of all JJ2 TSF frames (9.4 MB), and an extracted directory of them (LARGE listing..).. Please don't link to these from anywhere.. and if you actually look at them, tell me if anything is messed up in the slightest. The only think I noticed is the Suckers (?) have green spots.. possibly because of the Diam2 palette, possibly because of a bug on my part.. also things like the pinball bumpers which are tileset dependant look funky.. but whatever..

note that they haven't been broken up into "sequences" (walk, attack, ..) yet, just "sets" (bilsy, jazz, weapons, ..) and are still top-down bitmaps.. the "real" release won't have these problems.

...Whoa. There are a lot of things I never expected JJ2 to have... for example the doors (set 122), a cheering Eva (177) or an EXPANDING CIRCLE (182).

And before Cooba comes in, yes, I realise others may have known about them.

EDIT: Also check out 202, 306 (which seems to contain lots of sprites I've never seen) and 406 frame 27 (Koopa shield!).

i saw then. =D

hilarious

There is no set 177. >o

What about the boxing globe? That one could be the non-working weapon 0 what you get with the All Ammo cheat in Jazz Advantage!

Cheeeter Booo >o

EdiT: (-) u FilTeR AlL CapS

A fair amount of that stuff was already viewable with just sprite ripper. Anyway, the expanding circle is most probably some sort of blast/hurt radius, probably from RF's, though I haven't compared the sizes.

u mean its something like masks for the eplosion?

I think it's fairly funny that when lori morph's back from the frog, the sprites used are just a poor recolor of Jazz's.

I got Jazz Advantage to see that weird hidden uncomplete weapon, what, as I said, can be that boxing globe.
EDIT: It can be the weapon used to defeat Tweedle without gun!

You know, I have a sneaking suspicion the Boxing Glove is what the unworking spring event is

However, JA doesn't show it.

Lets haer it for hidden stuuf! [Some of which can go into the ripped from other games thread]

BECAUSE they removed that weapon, but not the weapon place, thats why it is there but doesn't show.

I wonder why there are these 1x1 pictures in the font.

Why would the author of JA make it that way?

They are the ghosts of characters never drawn.

:O ghosts

little update.. I threw some rearrangeing code together in the last half hour.. the results aren't too great with the current system (although using a new one won't be bad.. I can reuse most of the code)

A few randomly selected sheets: http://www.princeton.edu/~mspear/jj2/

I don't think I'll be able to keep 1 sequence per row and same space taken up per sprite, as some sprite sheets get HUGE (jazz=50MB!, all=~250MB total).. I'll probably just switch to closest packing or something, but I'll try a few other things including a batch PNG or GIF conversion...