Incredible hacking by my colleague and mentor Cubear allows custom sprites to appear on the map that match all 109 Jobs in the game. The latest version even shows status effects outside of battle, like Poison, Zombie, and Petrified. And now exact colors from the battle outfits are used, making this an extremely immersive upgrade to FFV!
My part of this project is merely adapting the existing sprites to fit the numerous new Job outfits in waterga’s 真説FF5r-IC romhack. Cubear accomplished all of the new logic that makes the game pull up these sprites, add the 16 color palette from the Job’s battle appearance, navigate cutscenes in the game smoothly, and shift colors when status effects are present. Someday I hope to have the understanding of how to modify SNES assembly code to figure out what was done, as it’s all a bit too complex for me to follow in detail at this moment.
And Cubear also created the sprites, taught me how to render the adjusted PNG files into binary files, and showed me how to swap in the custom FF5r-IC assets in place of the vanilla FFV Jobs.
Here is the repository with the first version of Dresscode. The new v2 work described above is under test so it’s not available on GitHub at this time.
Approximately half of the 109 map sprite tilesheets need changes to work with the new Jobs in FF5r-IC. A few require completely new sprites, many only need changes to hats or clothing. All of these have new color layouts, so even the simplest adaptations (like when Dancer’s outfit is reused for Shaman by Krile, Lenna, and Faris) are recolored to use different palette assignments.
I’ve been at this work for about 8 weeks now and it’s nearing completion. Parfait the new main character in this romhack is directly inspired by an existing NPC in the original game, so it’s important to keep her appearance close to this while crafting her Job outfits— I can’t just reuse existing Dresscode v1 assets, but I can leverage them a bit. I’ve saved the Parfait phase of this project for last, so that I can build up momentum and skill along the way.
Except for Parfait, the other four heroes require the following custom Dresscode sprite changes in The Definitive FF5r-IC: