The VG Resource

I ended up ripping all monster sprites (as far as I'm aware) from 7th Dragon after someone mentioned that there were no rips available (apparently???) I may rip more stuff since the graphics seem to be (operative word: seem) straightforward to deal with (Full colour, no compression.)

Note that I have not played 7th Dragon myself, so I have no clue if this is a full rip of all monsters in the game or not (the developers might have done some weird trick like make the background a monster or something???), so let me know if I missed something! It'll help if you can provide a screenshot or a youtube video of the missing graphics so I can see it in context and figure out how it's stored.

Rips:

Monster sprite rips
Battle background rips
Player sprites
NPC portraits

You might be missing something because some of the file names are weird in the zip itself. The numbering system goes up to 240 but there are only 205 images in it.

(03-14-2017, 04:52 AM)Deathbringer Wrote: [ -> ]You might be missing something because some of the file names are weird in the zip itself. The numbering system goes up to 240 but there are only 205 images in it.

Nah, the numbering is from my program, not internal data. The missing images are either obvious placeholders (blank grids) or not monster sprite data; the last 4 monster sprites in the data are separated by ~20 BG images for some reason.

Something's definitely missing, according to a monster list I found online (http://kumicyou.sakura.ne.jp/7thdr/dmon.html), there are at least 239 entrees. What kind of BG images?

Looks like battle backgrounds:



For reference here's how the battle graphics are organized in the ROM unpacking:

All the battle graphics are, as far as I can tell, stored in btldata.bvb. There's a second file called btldata.bvh which seems to have the structure of the .bvb file with an array of pointers starting at offset 0x3920 (the first monster graphic pointer is at 0x4554.) The data the pointers point at all start with 4 character string headers:

First there's BPCC data which are the player character graphics.

Next there's one OVER/RESU/SKIC/ASPR which looks like the UI graphics.

Next there's a bunch of TXLS data which look like either compressed data or metadata for assembling graphics.

Next there's BSBC which looks like all the FX animations for spells and similar things.

Next there's one TEST/SKIC which are graphics whose purpose I can't figure out.

Finally there's BECB/BEDC data which are the monster graphics, with a chunk of BBGC images in the middle near the end.

Edit: Ripped the battle backgrounds and added them to the first post.

(03-14-2017, 01:39 PM)Deathbringer Wrote: [ -> ]Something's definitely missing, according to a monster list I found online (http://kumicyou.sakura.ne.jp/7thdr/dmon.html), there are at least 239 entrees. What kind of BG images?

Some of the monsters in the game reuse sprites, and that page just grabbed every monster entry in the game data. However, a couple of those entries are unused.

Don't worry, you got them all. No monster in the game is a background (No Giygas shenanigans in this game.) The candidates that I would have even had in mind for that are in your rip.

Sweet, I'll wrap that up along with the battle background graphics for upload at some point.

Looks like portrait data isn't ripped yet so I'll poke at that next when I have time!

Just letting you know, there are actually 2 sets portrait data (for the players, anyway) in the game. The full ones (which are seen at the class selection screen), though those have an orange-green outline baked into those sprites. Then there are the closeup portraits which can be seen in the status screens of your party members.

The NPC portraits also have a green backdrop baked into them near the back of their heads.

Okay so I was sorting through the battle backgrounds and I found out something that needs to be recorded for posterity:

For story reasons, a lot of the battle backgrounds have a foreground image that is an overlay of red flowers, and at a glance they are all identical. However, when I compared them more closely it turns out they have slight differences (on the pixel level) from each other. So for some reason, the developers saved several copies of the same image in the ROM instead of reusing a single copy for the battle backgrounds. If you check the zip I uploaded in the first post you can see there's at least 20 backgrounds that use that image... this is so silly.

(04-19-2017, 01:01 AM)Dr. Fetus Wrote: [ -> ]Just letting you know, there are actually 2 sets portrait data (for the players, anyway) in the game. The full ones (which are seen at the class selection screen), though those have an orange-green outline baked into those sprites. Then there are the closeup portraits which can be seen in the status screens of your party members.

Aha, I found them in both in the mmvdata file. The format is slightly different from the monsters so I'll need to make new code for my ripper. Also, for some reason the NPC portraits file also has cutscene images. This game is bafflingly coded.

Edit: Player sprites and NPC portraits ripped, the extra data in the NPC file will be ripped later.