Making my own GRF

[c2icedtea]

Hi All,

I've decided to make my own GRFs to suit my style. Of particular interest are the texts for status effects.

As you can see below the screenshots, it's full of fails.

Now here are my questions:

1. How do I make the FROST word have a black outline?
2. I did get an outline using a pink background but what happened is as you can see below. When I use a black background, there are no problems but the outline disappears 
3. How the hell do I make transparent backgrounds? I plan to make FREEZE, STUN, SLEEP with these images

Cheers!

[exii]

Go to woe servers and try to grap every grf and tool you can get before you are trying to b**** through the next one.
That's the way noobs get their stuff. Otherwise you would need to google it like normal people do. This board don't have many grf modders and most of them only provides paid services. The rest is lazy or just don't give a s***.

[Triper]

Oh, so the ones that help are now ****? OK! You really haven't seen my PM box or any that helps with this things. You would really think the opposite about it after a day or two.

[exii]

All I can see is that the "guides" in this forum are a freaking joke. lel
The support for costum related things here is on it's lowest level. No offense.

[c2icedtea]

Give some links then. Still, I think my query is just basic stuff for modders here.

[Triper]

http://rathena.org/wiki/Main_Page  - How hard is to search there?

http://rathena.org/wiki/GRF - tells you the tools needed and even points you to data.ini and says you to do add your grf to the ones presented in the server
http://rathena.org/wiki/Acts - acts for sprites
http://rathena.org/wiki/Sprite_Recolors - sprite recoloring and even say the prog to use as the colours
http://rathena.org/wiki/Pixeling - making sprites from zero
http://rathena.org/wiki/Hexing - bonus url

Most of the players are lazy to use that wiki and learn from that as in school or to even use the basic google for any advanced tutorial about any of those things, why should we do a guide to everybody use if they don't even use that one?

[c2icedtea]

I meant exii's woe sites. But thanks Triper for these links. I'll look onto them once I get home from work.

GRFs make people crazy.

[exii]

Best location is woe-ro but I doubt that you will get some stuff there.

x-ro
woon-ro
case-ro
and maybe this
playragnarok

Also watching out for some brasil super woe servers. They're up from time to time. If you have time you should focus multiple servers to make the process faster.

You also can learn how to make them by yourself but I can tell you that making a grfs on a acceptable level often is really hard. The sprite you made look pretty ok but as you can see, that hard thing is to master the required programs. It's mostly a trial&error because these program are old and you cannot many good guide especially if you want to google the word "actor" you often have hollywood actors as your search result.
The reason why I told you to grap as much as you can is simple: I did the same. You will notice by the time how files are changed and it's easier to understand it then.

Just a smart selection of the stuff I graped:
http://puu.sh/a1ZOL/019afff2da.png


Triper was here - PM him the links, you can't post them in here because of the rules.

[c2icedtea]

Thanks. I'll try to slice and dice more stuff. I'm ditching MS paint too.

[exii]

I'm just using MS paint, photo filtre and sometimes irfan view. They are very simple in use and providing the features which you basicly need to edit you stuff.
But ofc those programs hitting their limit if you are trying to make semi-transparent icons like this.

Btw you did a mistake with converting your status sprites I guess. Never seen that before and it would be time eating to reproduce this error without the original source.
Not sure about the others but I'm more interessted in bugged sprites for a better understanding how to prevent them.

[c2icedtea]

I reverse engineered a status sprite. Those status texts are GIFS and I just paste them on the 256color bitmaps. Change the background to magenta or black. And there you have it.
I tried making my own based on Triper's links. Says that in making from scratch, you need to make the background magenta, 256color bitmap. Did that, and what I got was a pink box 

[exii]

lolwat
There is not a single .gif file in the whole grf.

Seems you did something really wrong.

[Triper]

But you do use images, like a *.gif, to makes animations with stuff like RO STR Viewer [at least I think that it was possible to use those files in there last time I used it, like some of months ago] even if png files [well, you could always use tga or tiff, i think the prog supports it, but png is way easier to work with] are better to preserve quality unless you want to work with CMYK ranges or want to use animations instead of static images which is silly to do because you're dealing with frames already.
Also, both PNG and GIF preserve transparencies.

[exii]

.bmp (256 color or 24bit) and .tga are the basic file types.
I don't think it was intended to use any other type as source because the quality of bmps and tgas are way higher as every other common file type.

If it's possible, ok, never seen this before. But it makes no sense to use file type with less quality. What programs you need to use to work .gifs? Oo

[Triper]

Gifs are just "pictures inside a picture" aka picture with frames like a video. There are a bunch of programs that do that [some are free] even if most of the people will just say - photoshop.