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FEBuilder Primer IV - The Character Builder

Let's Make a Character

In the last edition, we went over data redundancy and a general look at some of the recurring elements of editors like the Character Editor in FEBuilder for the Fire Emblem GBA games. As always, if this sounds like some garble of nonsense, please head over to my first post where I define some of these basics. We're past a good chunk of the background now so things should start moving at a nice clip!

Unfortunately, I got ridiculously sick last week, so this post is coming a few days later than planned because I could hardly concentrate, let alone compose a piece of writing that didn't look like the insane scribblings of dying chicken.

Chicken writing

Thankfully, that's on the mend and everything can continue as planned. From now on, I'll also be linking to a dropbox folder where I share all the assets I'll be using for this ROMhack tutorial. Importantly, there is a file: "credits doc" that I'll be keeping up to date with every custom asset I've used. This is really important and is something any aspiring hacker should plan on doing: give credit to people for their hard work and don't use anything that you don't have the rights for.

So...

Sayonara, Eirika!

Text

Like I said in the last post, the Character Editor is straightforward. This part's a piece of cake. Double click the “Eirika” text and we can replace her name with someone else... Someone edgier.

Someone.

Like.

Raven

Credit to Eldritch Abomination for his FE8-style recolor of Raven.

Oh yes. I’ll be demonstrating by rebuilding Dark’ness Emblem (and going further than the ~8 hrs I spent putting that together for April Fools) during the course of this series. What a treat. Please send help.

Note that the first time you do this, FEBuilder will prompt you to use the Anti-Huffman patch. Do that. You’ll only need to patch it in once. With that set, we’ll do the same thing for the description, because Raven’s no one’s princess. He’s a daddy. Feel free to out-edge mine and share it. If you can handle the weight.

Say No To Blue Hair

Support Class does exactly what it sounds like: changes the displayed class in the Support viewer. This does NOT effect stats or class in-game, as I mentioned briefly in another post. Raven could be a villager in Support Class for all the game cares.

Portrait is great, this will let us replace the portrait that currently shows Eirika with Raven. Again, if you don't have one ready for yourself feel free to grab Eldritch Abomination's Raven from my dropbox. For a broader range of options, use Klok's Ultimate Graphics Repository--peruse at your own risk, as you may get lost in there looking through all the cool stuff the community has made over the years!

Now that you've inserted your first portrait, make sure to look at eye and mouth alignment. They're rarely perfect on first import. You can see how your mug will look without correction on the bottom right of this next image.

That won't stand! Adjust the Mouth/Eye XX and YY up or down until Raven’s face looks like a face. Portraits will be explored further in another post, as the portrait list is called with a half-word (two bytes), meaning that you can theoretically have thousands of portraits in your ROM and don’t necessarily need to overwrite anyone like we just did with poor Eirika. Sorry Eirika, you're outta here.

Next up is Mini Portrait. We want this to be 0 for all our non-generic units, otherwise they’ll use a generic mini-portrait on the map. Pretty straightforward.

Affinity is an easy menu that simply changes the units affinity for support bonuses and sort order does what it says it does; it generally doesn’t need to be touched. If you want to read up on how it works and see a neat chart of what bonuses are what, check out the Affinity page on the Fire Emblem Wiki.

Finally, Unit Palette will let us make our character have a unique palette in combat. In FE8, this can be set for up to 7 classes per character. A deeper dive into this will be pursued in a future blog.

That’s all well and good, Shindad, but why haven’t we made Raven the killing machine he’s supposed to be?

Well never fear, that time is now.

Phat Stats

The most important thing of note in this section is that the Unit Base Stats are added atop the Class Base Stats (altered in the Class Editor). This is mentioned in the tooltip, but it’s very important, because a 0 in HP will never be a 0 in gameplay... unless you also make a class with 0 base HP. But no one is that silly, right?

With that out of the way, I’m just going to give Raven the base stat additions of:

  • LVL 6

  • 7 HP,

  • 5 POW,

  • 5 DEF,

  • 3 RES,

  • and 5 CON

Bop down to Growth Rates and these are simpler: what you see is what you get. We’re going to give Raven:

  • 66 HP,

  • 66 POW,

  • 50 SKL,

  • 40 SPD,

  • 33 DEF,

  • 20 RES,

  • and 33 LUK

To ensure that we have as many 666 references as possible without being ridiculously absurd. Unfortunately, growth rates are referenced with only a single byte, and, as we discussed in the last post, that means they cap out at 255, and can't reach 666. How sad.

As we’ve been doing all this, the stat calculator has been whizzing out new numbers. These are averages, and you can set the level to different numbers to test out averages at any level you desire. This is for your benefit as the hacker for balance purposes and has no impact on gameplay.

I’m not even going to clip base WLVL. Just note that the breakpoints are 251 (S), 181 (A), 121 (B), 71 (C), 31 (D), and 1 (E). The weapon level number can be any number from 0-255 and this number doesn’t have to be at one of these breakpoints.

Abilities, Support, and Conversations

Abilities are a shared list between Units and Classes. As such, many of the skills are generally set to classes, while others are generally set for units. Weapon locks are perhaps the most fun and useful of the default skills to modify your ROM with. With them, it’s possible to make custom weapons for all of your favorite characters that are restricted to only their use. I recently updated the tooltips for all of these for each of the three Fire Emblem GBA ROMs, so if you’re feeling curious just hover over each individually.

Support Data

Support Data is a pointer that leads to another tool which allows you to set who supports whom, how fast that occurs, and the conversations that they have (through more pointers).

Finally, Conversation sets what group a character is in for generic responses when visiting villages. All characters grouped together use the same pointer data for these generic visits.

Raven's Reign Begins

With that, we’ve dug in (perhaps too deeply!) to the Character Tool. I honestly didn’t think there would be this much to go over here, but it is a very powerful tool and makes inserting characters a snap.

Thanos

We skipped setting up unique supports, palette data, map sprites, and classes, but these call for a future post anyhow. Does anyone have remaining questions about the Character Editor? Did I forget to mention something that'd be really helpful or not explain something enough? What are some things you’ve found useful about FEBuilder? Negative, positive, or ambivalent, let me know in the comments. Until then, I’m Shindad the Great, and you’re pretty awesome, too.

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