noob questions from a noob

[DTD]

Hi, I'm DTD. If I remember it correctly, I first knew what Pokemon rom hacks is at the beginning of last year, and I have always wanted to "twitch" the rom to my very own flavor =)). So I started to do "rom hackings" ( at a very noob level which I believe should just be called editing..). And from my experiences of hacking come questions. These questions stuck in my head and I always feel itching to get answers.. And in the end, I gathered courage and came to the decision of posting my questions here on PHO! So here they are:
1. HP BARS(aka EXP box).. first of all, thereliterally are no tutorial whatsoever how to change ..uh this. I saw them in some hacks and ended up falling in love with those beautiful hgss and/or custom hp bars..playing a hack without those glorious exp boxes make me fill a little missing . SO can anyone show me how to changes those hp bars ?
2. INI. So what are these exactly? As far as I am concerned, then INI are profile for (pokemon?) roms. And they are needed if one wants to open certain rom with certain hacking tools (if not all). SO the QUESTIONS is, how do I create(or make) one ? ... Sorry for saying this, but sometimes I feel tools are quite useless without certain INI to open roms ..

3. I do know that there are tileset in... pokemon roms.So as far as I know there are around 68 tileset in a fire red roms, which includes the 0 tileset. SO the QUESTIONS, is there anyway to increase the amount of tileset?..

That's all I wanted to ask today.Sorry for the wall of texts.
To be honest, I just want to edit the rom hack by making it looks bit better. Don't get me wrong, all the rom hacks are the best gifts from talented hackers. i just want to change miscellaneous stuffs like hp bars and tileset and overworlds..etc. And I'm sorry if I have said anything sensitive
P/s: English is not mother language, so please forgive me I have made any mistake
Have a nice day =))

[Sky0fBlades]

1) The HP Bars... I don't know how to completely overhaul them, but for my hack I did change the colors of them along with many other elements of the battle screen, status menus, Pokedex, etc. This seems to be a somewhat complicated process and it's been quite a long time since I've done this, however. Also bear in mind that all of this is really geared towards Emerald since I hack that one exclusively, but would probably apply to FireRed too. CAUTION: Back up your ROM just in case anything goes wrong!

To accomplish what I did (at least in the way I did it), you will need to hex-edit the color palette data which you can find in VisualBoyAdvance's "Palette Viewer". To do this, open the ROM in VBA, load up the game and go to a screen (i.e. the Battle Screen) and then open up the Palette Viewer to get a look at all the colors on the current game screen.

Now, you need to open Advance Map 1.92 or 1.95, load up any map of the game (Littleroot, ect) and click into the Block Editor (purple puzzle piece). In the editor window that comes up, click on the "Palettes" tab/button and click "Show palette editor". In this, click "Select color". You now have a tool you can use to find out the GBA RBG color values on any area of your computer screen. Also look at the small text box under the big colored block in this window (might say something like "28A3") This will come in handy in a bit, and it is basically the code number for specific colors in the game.

Now use A-Map's tool to find the color in the actual game screen you want to change, by looking at what values the three sliding bars in the program stop at when you hover your pointer over the object in-game, like the HP Bar. Remember these three values, and then click "Select color" again to manually set a color. Change the sliders to match the three values you remembered, and look at the little text box from earlier to get the 4-character code for that specific color.

Now back in VBA's palette viewer, you must find the color you want to change. If you want to find the color blocks representing the HP Box and Bar, you should find it in the "Sprite" box in the viewer. [If you are looking for the background of the screen (like the grass and sky) look in "Background"]. These groups of blocks currently contain all colors used in the battle sequence, some that change dynamically (if you check the "Automatic update" box you can watch it happen as you do things like send out Pokemon), but what you are looking for are ones that always use set colors (like the whole HP module). Look for a color box that has the same color as the one you are trying to change, and look down in the Palette Viewer where it says "Value" and 0x[4-chars]. IF that value matches the one you ended up with in A-Map, then you may have found it (some might be copy-cats and aren't the one you want).

Look at how the color is probably part of a horizontal row of other colors, and write/type down at 4 or more of their "Value" codes somewhere (maybe Notepad) in a row; something like this example:

0000 18C6 7F19 76D7 4E73 424F

then change them up by reversing them like this:

0000 C618 197F D776 734E 4F42

Test out changing the colors by opening up your ROM in a hex editor (like HxD) and search for the group of reversed values in your hex as "Hex-values" while your ROM is loaded in it, and you should get a result. Here, replace the color value of the color you are trying to change (18C6 would appear as 18 C6) with the reversed value of whatever color you want, using A-Map's Palette Editor to generate the non-reversed value by choosing your desired color with the sliders. Once you've replaced the old value in the hex editor, save your ROM in the hex editor and close it.

Then open up VBA and check to see if this color is changed in-game. If it is, then you are done! If not, then that means that the string of values you found in the hex editor was probably a duplicate/seperate one for something else, and you may need to do the search part again with either another backup ROM or after you have put the changed values back as they originally were.

Since this is such a lengthy process to explain (plus it may not even be entirely without problems), I may just make a YouTube video on it sometime but I don't know when I can get it ready and posted. Heck, I might as well post this as a guide here at some point as well.

Here's a picture of what I did to mine, you can use the same colors and stuff for yours if you want to:



The steps I outlined can get you the new colors you can see for the HP module and the text boxes (like the gray/black one). The rest of the battle background such as the cave colors, floor, etc. is a separate process though but it's not too hard depending on how detailed you want it to look.
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2) I may not be very knowledgeable on programming yet, but from my understanding .INI files are basically like .TXT files but they are read by a program that is associated in some way with them. They are usually structured in certain way so that they can be interpreted properly by the program. Now to make one, it seems all that needs to be done is to write up the codes/commands in a .TXT file, then save it as .INI. Unfortunately, for it to be used the way you seem to want, an actual program must apparently have the use of the .INI embedded in its code already.
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3) I haven't done this one either in a long time, but apparently Advance Map 1.95 has the ability to add entirely new tilesets into the ROM. As you do this however, just be careful to make backups of your ROM beforehand of course. LU-HO (creator of A-Map) posted a thread on another forum here about how he did this, but doing it manually looks like it would be a bit of a pain.

Here's a picture of where to find it in Advance Map 1.95:

[DTD]

thanks you so much for spending time answering my questions with such lovely answers

[Sky0fBlades]

No problem, and good luck with your ROM hack. If you have any more questions feel free to ask around.