What is green spew?

Sabertooth Norn with green spew on head and body

Green spew is something I first stumbled across when I was creating the Sabertooth Norns. It looks similar to the problem known as Rainbow Spew: it is an undesired "glitch" in which some or all of a Norn's body parts appear covered in green pixels when viewed in the game.

Although uncommon, it has posed problems for some creators in the past; the Sabertooth Norns, Yautja Norns, Deep Norns, Gaius, Dustdevil Grendels, and the updated C2toDS Pixie Norns have all suffered green spew during their development.

This is a slightly trickier problem than Rainbow Spew, as it is not caused by the same file formatting issue that causes Rainbow Spew. It afflicts both Windows and Mac users equally, and methods used to remove Rainbow Spew (eg. converting them to 565 format using Sprite Editor) are not always a reliable cure for green spew.

The best way to avoid green spew is to be proactive. Instead of pasting sprites into a new, blank sprite file, start with copies of pre-existing breed sprite files (eg. those for the ChiChis) and paste over the frames with your own sprites. A Norn's body parts are much more likely to develop green spew if the sprite files are created by pasting the sprites into a brand new file.

To date, the most reliable method I have found for fixing already afflicted sprites is to open SpriteBuilder (in Administrator Mode if necessary) and load a sprite file for an official breed, eg. the ChiChi or Bruin Norns. Hit Save. Then load the spew-afflicted sprite file and hit Save again; the "good" attributes of the official Norn breed's sprite file should be applied to the spew-afflicted sprite file, "curing" it of the green spew.

If you have multiple sprite files that need to be fixed, it works best to close SpriteBuilder and re-open it "fresh" before continuing. Go back to the official breed's sprite, hit Save again, and then go on to the next afflicted file. For whatever reason, loading afflicted or previously afflicted files one after another doesn't always seem to be reliably effective.