Raquet / Wiki / v1x / Creating Sprites

Creating Sprites

Table of Contents

• What the Hell is a .PPF?
• How Do I Make a .PPF?
• Advanced: The .PPF Specification

 Raquet is a bit of a funny guy. He has the capability to read modern file formats, but he refuses to unless you rearrange his internals and perform a lobotomy. Instead, he prefers to use his own file format that his mother used to make.

What The Hell is a .PPF?

 A .PPF file is identical to the NES .CHR format, just with a header because I didn't know I was making the .CHR format by accident... don't judge me... please.

How Do I Make a .PPF?

 You can create a .PPF file by either using a .CHR editor, and then adding the header manually through hex editing, or you can use the PPF-Sprite-Editor tool to create the format (beware, it's a bit buggy when switching through palettes, we usually just do sprite creation in a seperate program before porting it over with the tool).

These little guys are funny, I like them.

Advanced: The .PPF Specification

This section is more for if you're writing your own interpreter or renderer for the .PPF format

 The .PPF V1.0 Specification is very simple.

Firstly, the Header is just an ASCII PPFv followed by hex numbers representing the version. Currently, the only .PPF version is 01 00 00 00

 The format is stored with 2 bits per pixel, with 16 bytes allocated for each 8x8 tile. The first 8 bytes is for Transparency and Palette 1, and the second 8 bytes is for Palette 2, and Palette 3 which only gets drawn if both bits are set to 1.

For example: If I want to have the first row of my tile to be a solid Palette 1, I can set the first 8 bytes to:
FF 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
and the 2nd 8 bytes to:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

If I want to set it to Palette 2:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 and FF 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
if I want to set it to Palette 3:
FF 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 and FF 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
and if I want to set it to transparency:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 and 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00