Creating Sodom from scratch

As some of you may know, I have teamed up with BlackJack to make Sodom from Street Fighter Alpha, a previous version (made entirely by him) can be obtained here. To be true, I started the char a while back in order to show in this site how you can make a character from scratch while making a full char myself. Then BlackJack showed me his stuff and we decided to team up.

Anyway what you are going to find here is ALL the steps needed to make a full character in MUGEN. These will take some time , so I will run this in weekly or biweekly installments, as time permits. So ,let's get started!

Part 1: Getting the sprites

- Getting Started

After you have decided which character you want to make, it's time to get his sprites, meaning all the frames that compose his various animations in the game. The technique of extracting this frames from the game that the char appears in, is called "ripping" , or "sprite ripping".

Animation in MUGEN is like SFX in movies, you need to have your char against a one color background (like the green screen in movies), that color MUST NOT be part of the char's colors, so we usually use solid black,green or a furious pink as backgrounds. This is done because this colors will be replaced by the engine with the background you are fighting in. (just like the movies!)

So how do we get these frames anyway? Some sites in the net offer sprites set cleaned and ready to use, so you can check there if they have the char you are plan to make. If not , (the usual case!), you should use an emulator and the ROM of the game that your char is in. There are various emulators in the Net, go to www.vintagegaming.com to find the emulator that plays the game you want, you will need to find the ROM of the game also, but I can't provide directions for that ^_^.

Once you got the emulator and the game, it's best to check if the emulator can "disable layers". This means not displaying some areas like the lifebars, time counter,backgrounds,etc and in fact making your job easier, since the emulator will display the character against a one color background, just what you needed. Check the documentation of your emulator to see how you disable layers.

Almost all emulators also give you a key to take "snapshots" of the screen (Mugen lets you do it also, just press F12 ), and saving them to your harddisk. The repeated pressing of this key will let you capture all the frames you need for your char. Again, check your emulator's documentation to see which key is used to take snapshots.

In a perfect world you would also want some kind of "pause" button in the emulator too. The animation in most fighting games is so fast that you would certainly miss many frames if you capture frames while playing. A pause button is recommended,so you can pause the game, take the snapshot,pause again and repeat till you are done. Sounds lenghty? IT IS!!! Sprite ripping takes a long time and it will surely tax your patience quite a bit, so be ready to spend some time with it.

So you will need these things to start:

-emulator that plays the game you want to rip from

- check if it can disable layers (like Callus,Snes9x,etc)

- check which button is the "take snapshot" button

- check for a Pause button or Frame Advance while Paused, to make ripping easier.

-the rom of the game

-a program that lets you browse easily through your captures (Polyview,Acdsee,etc)

-a graphics program for retouching frames,cleaning an pallette making (Paint Shop Pro,Corel,PhotoShop,etc)

- Ripping Sodom with Callus DOS

Sodom in Street Fighter: Alpha

While ripping Sodom I used the Callus emulator to rip from Street Fighter Alpha. Fortunately, Callus DOS supports all the features I mentioned earlier:

- Layer Disabling

- Pause button

- Snapshot button

And the reason I prefer Callus DOS over Callus Windows: Frame Advance. This lets you pause the game and advance frame by frame, so ripping it's as easy as pause the game, take snapshot, frame advance key, take another snapshot,frame advance, repeat. This way you won't miss a single frame of animation!

So we load Street Fighter Alpha, configure the keyboard to our liking (see Callus docs for this) and we are ready to go. Start a 2 player game, so you have a "dead" opponent. Now it's time to disable those layers.

Go to the Settings menu, then select Layers and uncheck all the options , except for "Sprites".You should now get an image like this:

Disabling all background layers , to show only the sprites

That's the one color background I have been telling you. You don't have to worry in this case, cause disabling all layers makes Sodom stand against a solid black background. This black color will be our "transparent" color. More on that later.

Now you are ready to take snapshots , press the F9 key and you should see a message in the bottom of the screen telling you something like "the image has been saved in c:\fallenangel\shots\callus001.pcx" or similar.

Note that Callus saves to PCX files, the same kind of file that MUGEN uses for input , so you are on the right track.

Because sprite ripping is a somewhat difficult task (even if Callus helps you A LOT), you will need to organize yourself. When I ripped Sodom, I made a "Sodom" directory and subdirectories with all the moves he has. Basically it looks like this:

I always have a "ready" subdirectory to place all the sprites that are indeed "ready" to use. It's better this way, I keep the original snapshots in another dir in case I mess up with something and use this as the working directory. When I'm done with the char,all PCXs file go into the "finished" directory, so I can zip them and send them to Blackjack, for example.

When ripping normal moves (standing punches,kicks,etc) I use this structure:

Like I said before: it's MY way of doing things, so take it like you wish. Go with the method you are most comfortable with, but try to be organized, cause if you mess up a frame it's horrible to go back to the game, do the move, rip again,etc and there are LOTS of frames in today's games, believe me. Besides , most emulators save your captures with non-descriptive names, so when you want to know wich PCX belongs to which move you will probably get lost.

Ripping an actual move

There is a feature about Callus that I haven't mentioned yet: movies. This emulator lets you make "movies" of the game you are playing, so that you can playback them whenever you wish. You can only save 9 movies but that's more than enough.

To make a movie in Callus go to the CPU menu, choose MOVIE, then hit RECORD. Now play the game normally. When you are satisfied,go again to the CPU menu, choose MOVIE, then hit STOP (there are keyboad shortcuts for this,check Callus docs for help). Of course, if you want to take a look at what you just "taped" , go to the CPU menu, choose MOVIE, then PLAY.

Why am I telling you all this? Because movies make ripping extremely easy! Say you want to rip Sodom's standing punches:

- go to the CPU menu, choose MOVIE, then hit RECORD, the movie will start recording

- now press the punch buttons in order: Jab,Strong,Fierce (press each twice if you want to be sure you are not missing any frames, when you get the hang of it you will need to press the button only once, you will notice the animation change easily)

- go again to the CPU menu, choose MOVIE, then hit STOP

You have your movie, now it's time to rip frames!

-go to the CPU menu, choose MOVIE, then PLAY, these will play the movie you just recorded

-press ALT+P as soon as the movie starts to pause the animation.

- press F9 to take a snapshot

- press ALT+A to advance one frame in the movie. If a new frame doesn't appear, do it again until Sodom shows a new frame

- press F9 to take a snapshot

- press ALT+A to advance one frame in the movie. If a new frame doesn't appear, do it again until Sodom shows a new frame

- repeat

When you are done, you will have all the frames of Sodom's Standing punches saved in your harddisk,probably in the Callus directory.

See? It's real easy once you get the hang of it, just make a movie, do the moves then rip. I must warn you that Callus saves up to 99 frames in its directory, after that it doesn't save any more frames, even if no error message appears.

To avoid this, check the message that appears in the bottom of the screen when you press F9 , the file will contain a number, when the PCX filename reads something like "Callus099.pcx" exit Callus and move your captures to another dir, for example to an structure of directories like the one I showed you before. That way you won't lose your captures and you can have your Callus directory clean, ready to rip another 99 frames.

And no, you will not lose your movies when exiting, Callus saves them to your harddisk ,so they are always there.

Browsing through your captures

You have ripped your frames,it doesn't matter if you just ripped one move or the entire set, you can go back and forth between this one and the previous section.

Like I said, it's cool to have a browser program that lets you take a look at your captures in a fast and easy way. I use Polyview , but of course you can use whatever you prefer:

Browsing through the captures with Polyview

Emulators don't save snapshots with descriptive names , so when you look at your captures, they will have names like "Rockma73.pcx" or something like that. If you don't look at them in a graphical way, it will be impossible to know for you which capture belongs to which move!

Because of that, it's best if you give each capture the name of the move followed but the frame number, for example for the Jump animation , have files named Jump1,Jump2,Jump3,etc. All this browser programs lets you change the name of your files while you look at them , so use this feature. Remember, if you keep yourself organized it will later become easier to insert these frames into the engine, so your development time will shorten quite a bit. But don't rename those captures yet,check the next section first.

Cleaning the captures

If you have looked with attention the above screens, you probably noticed that Callus captures the entire screen when ripping. Of course you don't want that, you want just Sodom. Besides, Sodom has a "shadow" between his feet, you don't want that neither, cause Mugen has it's own shadows.

You need to clean those frames.Use the graphics program of your choice ( I used Corel Photopaint 7) and load a couple of images in it.Use the selection tool to select just the part of the screen you want, choose Edit, then Copy to copy the selected image to the clipboard,then go to the Edit menu again,choose Paste as New Image (or the equivalent in your program) , and a new image with just the portion you wanted will be generated.

Cleaning the screen captures in Corel PhotoPaint 7

I must stress here that you arm yourself with patience, you will probably need to clean many frames in your endeavor,so it's indeed a long task,but it's the only way your char will look good. Besides, you are going to learn how the professional animators work by looking at their every frame ^_^.

Oh,you needed to clean that shadow too. Ok, every decent graphics program has a "color replacer" function. This does what it says, u just choose a draw color and a background color,and when u drag the mouse over your image the draw color will be replaced by the background one.

We already said that "we need to have our char against a one color background,bla,bla,bla" . So we choose this one color as the background color,and the color to be replaced as the draw color.

In the Sodom example, he has a dark blue shadow, so I selected that color and choose black as my background color. Now I drag the mouse over the shadow, using the color replacer function in Corel PhotoPaint, and that's it, the dark blue shadow gets replaced by the black used in the rest of the background.

Elimating the "shadow problem"

Now you have your frame ready. You should have your char against a one color background,in this case black. As I said before,use your favorite tools here,especially if your familiar with graphics programs.Ok, save that image (save it as a PCX file,don't forget ) and give it a descriptive name , like jumpfierce1,Walk1, or whatever you prefer.

Example of finished sprite

Part 2 : Creating a color pallette for Sodom - ACT files

Now it's time to make the pallette that your char is going to use. Remember that this pallette will hold ALL of your char colors, you can't have separate pallettes for special,super or fireball moves, so take this into account when making the ACT file. Of course,you can have several pallettes for your entire char, so you can have a pallette where Sodom's Sais are red and another where they are green (yuck! just an example!).

How do you make this pallette? Well,it's simple enough if you got the right tools. The easiest way is to choose a frame that has the most colors. I can't help you with this,it's a visual thing,you know. Try not to choose frames were most of the char costume is hidden and if he throws projectiles be certain to include them.

Ok,like I said before, you will need some tools for this. Go to www.elecbyte.com and grab PCXPAL,PAL2ACT and PCXCLEAN (I think they all come in a single package). PCXPAL lets you extract a pallette . PAL2ACT converts a PAL file to an ACT file, the pallette file you need for your char. Finally, PCXCLEAN lets you use that ACT file to assure you that all your frames use the same colors contained in the pallette.

I used Paint Shop Pro to extract Sodom's pallette. I choosed a frame and saved its pallete to a PAL file. To do this go to the COLORS menu, then choose SAVE PALLETTE, give the pallette a name you will remember and save it.

Saving the pallete file in Paint Shop Pro

Now its time to test your pallette. Open a bunch of other frames and , to apply your created pallette, go to the COLORS menu, then choose LOAD PALLETTE, choose the one you saved before and click OK.

Test it with a couple more frames. If you like what you see, and the colors look good enough for you, you

are ready to go.

Copy the PAL file you created in Paint Shop Pro to the folder where you have PCXPAL,PCXCLEAN and PAL2ACT. This is important, your pallete must be in the same path or the utilities won't find it.

Now, go to DOS and type:

pal2act nameofyourpal.pal nameofmugenpal.act

This will create the ACT file,so now you have a pallette file compatible with MUGEN,right?

Well...almost.

2.1 Cleaning your frames with PCXCLEAN

Open MCM ,now go to the SFF menu and choose Insert Images. Choose a pcx file, but not the one you chose before to make your PAL file,ok?.

Now press the ACT button in MCM:

Choose the ACT file you created earlier and Open it.

Most probably you will see a picture with distorted colors like the one below:

Ok, so maybe not THAT distorted, but it will certainly won't have all the right colors. And why is that? Because you haven't applied your ACT file to all your frames,so the remaining frames still have their original colors.

To correct this make sure that PCXCLEAN is in the same directory along with all your cleaned frames.

Go to DOS and type:

pcxclean -c -y *.pcx sodom.act

The above line will alter all your frames , so they can use the colors contained in sodom.act. Of course, all your PCX files will be rewritten to be compliant with the ACT file, so be sure to have a backup of your files, in case you screw things up :)

When you are finished go again to MCM and insert some of the newly created PCXs, select your ACT file and do some testing. If you have done everything right you should have all your frames cleaned, ready to be used and a pallette compatible with MUGEN. You have finished with the "graphic editing" part of your char.

Coming real soon: - Adding frames with MCM - Using Elecbyte's KFM as a template - Testing your stuff in MUGEN and more from your heavenly charming friend... ^_^:)

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