ROM Hack Tactics ogre the knight of lodis ripped assets?

[deathyr]

Did anybody ever extracted all the assets from Tactics ogre the knight of lodis? I would like to rip the dialog background and terrains textures (as jpg or png, all is fine). I'm not interested in things moving like GIFs
I saw a thread called how-do-you-open-gba-files-to-see-the-sprites-sounds-etc.362685 that can probably help, but I don't know which one of the methods I should use. The guy answering in that thread (FAST6191) is fantastic, I think he wrote a whole thesis on the argument. If somebody can suggest me a quick program to extract static images I would be grateful.

 

[FAST6191]

As mentioned in that thread there are no one program that can do it all -- programmers of games could arrange things however they wanted (within the limits of the hardware anyway), and they usually did.

If you don't care to spend however long it takes learning hacking in earnest ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ ) then you will probably be limited to emulator methods, which work just fine if a bit more long winded than some (though I still use them).
Some games have premade tools by people that went through the whole game and figured it all out, and in turn made tools using that info for others to play with, but while Tactics Ogre is liked by fans of tactics games it is not as well pulled apart by hackers (give or take a translation of the SNES entry in the series http://www.romhacking.net/translations/1501/ and a few choice piece of info for said same http://datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/Tactics_Ogre ). Not even the old insane difficulty people ( http://ngplus.net/InsaneDifficultyA.../board/index4126.html?/files/category/1-mods/ ) appeared to look at it and they went in for quite a bit of stuff.

To that end you are faced with emulators and either the tile viewers or disabling layers as you find things in the game. You can happily use whatever cheats are available (or make some) to allow you to speed through the game with infinite health or something so it is not like you need to do a full run. Similarly you can use savestates if there is branching path you want to take. If you want to get a little bit into hacking you may also be able to make the game display things way ahead, or more commonly, than they otherwise would -- the enemies on the screen are likely just a number that calls them and the game has a big list of numbers and their corresponding enemy, if you can then figure out either the maps/missions or the memory and change say a common mook enemy into the hidden final boss or something it will be there for you to grab without having to figure out everything else or play through the game to get there.

The dialogue background you could probably pull that from a video, though I suppose I would suggest the emulator method instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wLVL9Xepbs being the video it came from

As for the terrains I will warn you that many of these sorts of games have an awful lot of them -- you might have hundreds of enemies, pieces of equipment and such but it will possibly be thousands of background tiles.

 

[deathyr]

As for the terrains I will warn you that many of these sorts of games have an awful lot of them -- you might have hundreds of enemies, pieces of equipment and such but it will possibly be thousands of background tiles.

Yeah, that was what I was trying to avoid, it's going to be a pain to extract those in a manual way..
I guess I just need to learn hacking in earnest and figure out in which fashions the assets are included in the *.gba file. Do you know usually how many bytes could be one tile for a terrain? I can try a hacky long shot and generate all the possible sequences of x bytes inside the file.

 

[FAST6191]

Colours wise the image above could either be 4bpp or 8bpp. I see a bit of repetition as well but not that much.
The angle it is at is not what the graphics system does by default or supports in any real fashion so that is likely one or more tiles put together with some transparency (seemingly not on this one but I am sure you have seen other games have maps floating on nothing) or one massive image (you tend to see this more on the DS or with 3d games but it is not impossible for the GBA).

You could also face compression and offsets -- the latter is less likely but if it starts 4 bytes in off the conventional however many bytes boundary those numbers of possibilities shoot up. Compression on the other hand got very popular during the GBA, indeed the BIOS of it includes multiple decompression routines that games can and did use (which also make a method some find things with).

Really though emulator ripping is not so bad. If you can smack a tile editor into showing you things, and maybe use a colour palette you grabbed from an emulator, then do that. If you have to press print screen a lot (or do a screen capture and break that into individual images you can crop down) then it will get you what you want in a fairly reasonable timeframe.