Character conversion: rm2k to other engines

Hello everyone,
i just joined today after being away from rpg maker for years.

I used to play around with the old rm2k3 back in the day and i wanted to create something with the same graphics using a modern maker, however the process is quite long and tedious to adapt all characters and tilesets to lets say rpg maker mv.

It convert rm2k/2k3 charsets to vx, mv and other engines, 70% of it is basically just a glorified resizer, but maybe it could save some time to some people wanting to import those old nostalgic graphics to a modern engine.

I have a lot of irl stuff to do so i could only work on it for a week.

https://github.com/Brocoio123/2k-char-processor

This project is still pretty barebones, had only about a week to work on it, if i actually continue i'll add more features, i'll update this thread.

Spoiler: Images

MV:

VX ACE:

By the way, it says on the header "put your character sprites on the root folder", but actually its the 'Characters' folder.

Thats the idea, should i continue working on it?
Is this something that would be useful for other people today?

 

It's interesting to me, but my case is a little unusual. It's a secret project, so I'm not going to go into details, but something like this could same me some work later. I'm not sure how useful it would be to most people, and I can do this by hand easily enough. I would like you to continue, but I don't think you should base your decision on me in any way.

 

yes please!

 

I love the 2k3 resources I've got and I'd like to switch to MV soon. Don't want to spend time on converting stuff by hand. I hope you will keep working on that

 

Yeah i managed to do it easily on gimp when i wanted to get the resources to unity, but doing it every time i wanted to port resources is kind of a pain.
The idea is to do create something that could convert a whole batch of resources at once to any engine you would want, there are literaly thousands of free rm2k3 resources available out there, it would be a shame to think that they will just sit there being unused awaiting their deletion from their hosts.

Fixed it!

 

Oh! It converts for multiple engines? That's way more interesting than I was expecting! I am now very interested in this. I don't fully understand the layout for 2k3 yet, but if I could do it once and have it work on many, then I'd put more effort into learning the resource standards.

 

So, after six months with the project just sitting on my pc i finally got time to work on it, it is functional now, but quite barebones as i just had a couple of days to work on it.
There it is:
-It convert rm2k/2k3 charsets to vx, mv and other engines, 70% of it is basically just a glorified resizer, but maybe it could save some time to some people wanting to import those old nostalgic graphics to a modern engine.

Just clone or download the repo and click on Start.bat, information on the README.
https://github.com/Brocoio123/2k-char-processor

If anyone has the time to use it, please report bugs and make suggestions, i'll include those on the next version.

I'll update the thread or create another later

 

If I click start.bat it just briefly flashes the command prompt at me. So I went and edited start.bat and added a "pause" line at the end so I could see what it was doing. Got this.


Downloaded python, still the same. Any idea whats wrong?

 

If you're taking suggestions, having the program batch them through rotsprite to resize would be pretty useful. It's not as good as a real pixel artist for upscaling stuff, but it's pretty good and respects color counts.

for example, it upsizes


to this

 

You get this even after downloading Python? Thats strange, i'm on vacation right now, when i get home i'll try to make an executable version.
Can you try to run the command python -V on cmd and see if it works?
Also, can you try to install both python 2 and 3?

Pillow already has nearest neighbour, bilinear, bicubic and anti-aliasing resising, it would be interesting to add another option, do you know a library that works with this algorithm?
Also, your resized image has some artifacts such as thicker contours and the eyes of the characters seem to be severely deformed, is this normal with this method?

 

You end up with some weirdness when resizing to a fractional multiplier - that's sort of inevitable no matter what algorithm you use, since obviously going from 2-pixels of eyes to 3 pixels of eyes is either gonna be wider somewhere, or end up smearing the colors. I personally think it's easier to touch-up a sprite with a few misplaced pixels of the right color than try to touch up something that's blurred the pixels together, but obviously people have different workflows and art preferences

Look like there's already free-use python code for an implementation of the algorithm without the cleanup.

https://github.com/pinobatch/hello-world/blob/master/rotpixels.py

Which is based on this forum post from Xenowhirl describing the algorithm