It's okay bro. It was looking really nice already, I'm sure you'll only improve upon what you had before.

Well, it'll be smaller for one thing. And I'm thinking about handling NPCs differently. Instead of being part of the tilemap, maybe I'll have them separate like in Pokemon

So as some people might have noticed, I finally got my own computer. it's a mixed blessing that it's old (runs win xp); it's a little slow, but that means that I can have access to all sorts of x86 programs that I didn't before (and i have admin rights which i dind't have on the fam comp) So what all of this means is:

-Faster coding/debugging due to access to Tokens and Wabbit
-Faster data asset creation due to access to things like Calc GS

And in general, motivation for me to continue this project.


Side note: I think I'm going to switch to 4 lvl gray. The only thing that prevented me from doing so before was that all the tile data had to be masked because I designed the mapping engine kinda strange. However, I'm also unsure if any computer map/tile programs have support for 12x12 4lvl gray...

Squidgetx I hope this computer doesn't constantly crash like the other one X.x. Nice though.

As for 12x12, I guess the only issue is that the unaligned tiles might be slower, but otherwise I guess it should be fine.

Also I remember something about it having a limited amount of tiles space. Something like 210 but it could be lower. Iambian got in serious trouble because he could no longer fit more tiles/sprites in at one point for E:SoR.

Why not just write a simple C/Python/Ruby script to quickly rearrage it?  Or even just do it by hand?  I mean, how different *is* your format?  I'm guessing that you want 4 8*8 sprites or something instead of a packed 16*16 one -- the simple fix is to change the sprite size to 8*8 before exporting.

Hi everyone.

So, if you've been paying attention to any of the other threads on this forum, you might have noticed that I'm resuming work on this project. Today I completed enough progress to warrant making an official update

The tilemapper turned out to be quite a challenge to code. I wanted to use calcGS to handle the map and tile creation, since honestly, doing such a large project on calc was a massive PITA. However, using calcGS came with its own set of problems: export as 12x12 tiles? Or export as 4 8x8s? Well, at first I tried using 4 8x8s; it's kind of inefficient space-wise, but it plays nice with Axe's built in functions. I glanced at the old source code and chuckled. What was I thinking when I wrote THAT thing?? The old mapper handled each movement with its own routine, scrolling the map using Horizontal/Vertical and drawing with, get this; MASKED TILES mostly off-screen where they'd be shifted in appopriately. What was I doing??

I thought, I can just redraw the map every frame and have a nice, clean tilemapper, the kind I've been using in StickNinja, Embers, and Sandland. Except...grayscale. Oops, looks like even with my leet optimization skillz I can't get the mapper to run fast enough to support good grayscale.

Okay, no problem...I can do what i did before, but hey, I don't need to use masked tiles...this should be fine...

Nope, using 4 8x8 tiles with 12x12 tiles leaves clips and/or screen residue when you scroll, depending on whether you use Pt-On or Pt-Off. Choose your poison. So THAT's why I was using masks...

Well. This new version has to be at least a LITTLE better than the last one. There's no way I'm storing my tiles as masks...not to mention that calcGS does NOT play well with masked tiles.

Enter chickendude. With his help, along with lots of additional help from Runer112 and jacobly, I've managed to put together a hybrid Axe/Asm tilemapper from scratch (okay, maybe I did copy paste those 12 line blocks of rr (hl) \ inc hl's, thanks chickendude)

Anyway, in conclusion, check out the super not impressive screenie:



Oh, and as I promised, open source. The first page will be the go-to point for latest builds, screenies, and source

To do, by priority:
See if I can make the tilemapper run off of Archive. This, I think should be feasible and will let me cut down on user RAM and have 256 tiles per map
Add character sprite, animation
Start making tiles
(Later, after adding NPC rendering, I'll work on timing the gray better)
Begin infrastructure on sections of the program (menu, map transfer, npc, battle baselines)