Not sure where to start.... questions about Grapholic ECT.

[Amelie]

Hiya!  I know I'm new to this board and signing up and starting a fresh topic seems a bit rude, but I have a couple of questions I need answering, and after scouting around the site, can't seem to find the answers I need.

- Is Grapholic compatable with the ViperGTS DVD edition (the one with higher colour depth)?  I can't seem to get to to work with that edition, but I think I'm being stupid.

- How feasable is recompiling animations\graphics that have been altered back into Viper games?

I'm asking this as a big fan of Sogna games, and as someone that has an enthusiasm (read:out of practice) for animation and spriting, I was considering uncensoring as many scenes as my brain and eyes could manage before they burnt out, and it will be great for practicing using a graphics tablet.

For example - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Marchel/VIPERGTSUNCENSORED.jpg

The above link isn't even 50% completed yet (I'm well aware of the problems with the fingers, they're there as a guide), but as a plus, hardly took any time at all (thanks to GIMP), but I don't want to rush into anything and waste my time before I checked here first.

Thanks in advance for any help or feedback anyone can give me!

[Rai]

Not sure about GTS DVD and Graphaholic. I know there were a few of the later games that GTS had trouble with, but RSR DVD came out later and I know that works with Graphaholic. I guess if you were able to get the sgs.dat out of the image and Graphaholic refused to recognize it, then you'll have to try something else. I say just stick with the earlier versions since they'll be easier to edit seamlessly.

For getting your edited images back into the games, check this thread:
http://www.sognadigitalmuseum.com/forum/index.php/topic,263.0.html

and some relatively recent topics dealing with hacking the games:
http://www.sognadigitalmuseum.com/forum/index.php/topic,2261.0.html
http://www.sognadigitalmuseum.com/forum/index.php/topic,2436.0.html
http://www.sognadigitalmuseum.com/forum/index.php/topic,2285.0.html

It's all greek to me, but at least it sounds like the people who know what they're doing here are making progress.

[JG]

All VIPER games based on the SGS engine are at least mostly supported by Grapholic.  Grapholic doesn't handle the very large maps present in M1 and RSR though.  It also has problems with Guynarock-R, which has an unexpected extra byte in the middle of the file.

I'll have a better tool for extracting images available in a few weeks.  It'll come with tools to unpackage and decompress and also cormpess and repackage SGS.DAT files (something Grapholic will not do) so until I've released this tool you can't easily modify the games.  Once these tools are released you can uncensor the games to your fancy, so long as you keep the same palette for each image.

[Amelie]

Thanks for the replies!  JG00 - that sounds wonderful!  Once I've got used to using a tablet, (its like relearning to bloody draw) maybe I'll do some original stuff.

[黒い灯影]

I know, eh....
It doesn't have the resistance of a lead pencil, or mech pen...
When I got my tablet, I had to get used to that frictionless feeling...

You should do as much as you can... and someone else could probably take them and add them in..

[Asukachan]

I just cant get used to the tablet, thats one of the main reasons Im using paper for my game. It would be cool to have uncensored versions of the games and I cant wait to see what you dish out.