I went to work with the race logos again after I got too trustrated looking for the weapon textures controls.
Anyway, I figured out how to work with the textures in sprites.q3m at least the 16 bit ones. A crude Dominion logo (48x48, 16bit) I made can be seen in the attachment.
I'll try to explain the process through the example of this race logo in SFC3.
At offset 03 5F AE EB of the SFC3 sprites.q3 you'll find the following bytes: 2A 0E 00 00 99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0C 2D 00 00 A7 D7 44 03 FF 00 01 00 these control the Federation race logo. 2A 0E is just a name for this particular logo and I'm not sure what all the other bytes do but I do know that A7 D7 44 03 is the address of the image (in reverse, because little-endian, you'll find it at offset 03 44 D7 A7), 0C 2D (again, this is 2D 0C = 11532) is the size of the image plus its "header" in bytes (if you add that to the offset of the image you get the offset of the next image in sprites.q3).
Now since we do not want to move stuff in sprites.q3 we are going to add a new image to the end of the file and direct the control byte address to it. We can create crude images ourselves even without access to the custom color palette of the sprites.q3 file (see EDIT 2, below). We now to add 22 null characters (00) to the end of sprites.q3 (this will come in handy later). The next byte would be byte 03 61 5C AC so we go back to our 2A 0E control area and change A7 D7 44 03 into AC 5C 61 03. In crude drawing style we just need 48x48 pixels x2 (because 16bit colors take two bytes) = 4608 bytes for the image itself, plus 20 bytes for the header, but the game will want more (probably related to the custom color palette thing), so we actually need something like 4800 bytes, plus 20 bytes for the header. So in the 2A 0E control section we change 2D 0C into D4 12.
Now we must set up the header. Starting from byte 03 61 5C AC we type in: 30 00 30 00 18 00 18 00 00 00 10 00 FF 00 01 00 C0 12 00 00 The 30 00 30 00 part tells the game the image is 48 by 48 pixels, the 18 00 18 00 part tells the game to center the image at its center (24,24), 10 00 tells the game it's a 16but image, 01 tells the game to use some form of RLE compression that happens to work for our scheme (sadly, just choosing 00 doesn't make the game accept normal, uncompressed bitmap images), the C0 12 part just means 4800 bytes will follow the header (if you set this too low the bottom part of the image won't be rendered, it has to be larger than 48x48x2=4608).
We're now ready to construct the actual image. We must select 4800 bytes of data from somewhere in the sprites.q3 file (or any other binary file), copy and paste it behind the header we just made, then turn all the bytes into FF (FF FF makes a pixel black, not the usual 16bit color palette, but we can work with it). Because we've conveniently placed 22 null characters between the original end of the file and the image header the beginning of the image will align with the right side of the screen when we set the number of columns in our hex editor to 96. We can now start to "paint" our image: the first two bytes beyond the header are the pixel in the upper left corner of the image, every row of 96 bytes is exactly one row of 48 pixels in our image. I found that 0F 0F gives greenish color, and 0D 0D a blueish color, these are the only colors I used to create the image in the attachment.
And we're done!
EDIT: I found that FF 30 gives a nicer Dominion shade of purple, replace 0D 0D with it. Also 1F 00 works as deep blue, when you need that for another image.
EDIT 2: I found a program that produces images that can almost directly be put into sprites.q3. GIMP (available for Windows and Linux) allows you to export images as 16 bit BMPs with the X1 R5 G5 B5 advanced option. With compression set to 00 or 01, sprites.q3 will accept this, including the color palette, but you still have to vertically flip the image first and you have to move the color palette generated by GIMP to the back of the data. For a 64x64 16bit bitmap GIMP produces a file of 8330 bytes, you can work on it with a hex editor. The first 54 bytes are a bitmap header that you should not copy into sprites.q3 (which uses the custom 20 byte header header system I explained above), the next 84 bytes are the color palette, you should cut this and paste it at the back of the file. The actual data consists of 8192 bytes. Copy everything except the header (so 8276 bytes and paste it after the custom header you made at the end of sprites.q3. Of course the header should be adjusted for a 64x64 image size, centered at 32,32. The data size should be set to 8276 bytes (so for example change the C0 12 from the above example into 54 20). The compression byte should be set to either 00 or 01, but not 02. The control section (2A 0E in our example) needs to be updated too, so going with our example, turn D4 12 into 68 20.
This should work for all the 16bit images in sprites.q3, and in principle all 8bit images (some of the map icons and buttons, I believe) could be replaced by 16bit images if those are placed at the back of sprites.q3.
The result of this latest successful experiment can be seen in the second attachment, enjoy!
Topic: HEX Editing SFC3 - How to? (Also found Easter Eggs?) (Read 6160 times)