Topic: Tile Sheets

[Corpsecrank]

Update: 5-15

Well everything from cv1 is currently pulled and all that is left is to organize it all and make any edits needed. It is taking longer than I thought since I hit a couple minor snags along the way. I need to get the gear tiles another way. The ones I can pull are not animated at all and I am sure some of them if not all or most should be animate rather than a still object. Been a long long time since I played through stage 6 of cv1 though so I can't remember lol.

Anyhow pretty close to releasing a decent sized sheet that should be fully useable as is.

[FireSeraphim]

Actually I would be somewhat interested since I don't think I have enough castlevania tiles in my WIP fangame.

[Corpsecrank]

That is basically why I decided to ask around. You can never have enough materials let alone stuff you don't even need to edit you can just toss them in and go.

I created the tile sheet because I needed tiles for an animation. Using flash you can just toss an entire full background in the scene and then animate some sprites on top of the huge background. The problem is that when you do that the file size is enormous and it becomes impossible to make small changes to the backgrounds as the project gains depth to it.

With tiles I can build the background with instances of tiny objects effectively making the background as light weight as possible and modular. I can also change just the original tile I used for the instances and each instance will be changed so if I want a different color it is fast. I can edit individual instances as well giving even more precision control over the graphics,

But because the idea is almost exactly the same as designing a game all of the materials I am creating can easily be dropped right into a fan game and used with little or no changes needed.

I guess I just thought it would be worth asking around based on that.

[FireSeraphim]

@Corpsecrank: By all means, please share your tileset publicly!

[Corpsecrank]

I am going to upload the 300% scale version of these in png format. I have a psd that is at normal scale as well but I need to upload it somewhere else I think since I cannot attach it here. I will update this post with it when I do though but for now there is this.

[Corpsecrank]

So it looks like I can build a sheet for CV 1 and 2 really easy compared to CV 3 because of the way they built stages. In CV 3 they start overlapping tiles and that makes it a little harder to tell what a full tile in that game is. Overlapping the tiles was a great idea as far as making CV 3 goes since it helps give the illusion of better graphics than the hardware was capable of or maybe they were just starting to push what the hardware could do and it allowed them to overlap and make things look better. Either way it is different than what was done in the previous 2 games.

But my point is that I can grab all the CV 1 and 2 stuff pretty easy. I am starting there and I already have the majority of the first game done. I am going to finish that and pull all the stuff from the second game and update the sheet. Then I am going to start working on the third game. I think it will take longer to do CV 3 since there are a lot more stages and the whole overlap thing so it will take a while to get everything from that one.

I hope that when I get done with this we have a nice resource for guys to use in classic style games. I think the game maker engine found here and this tile set would be a great combination. The only thing missing would be the character monsters and items.

I am going to be using the first post to update this and post info about it as I make progress so just keep checking back. I will also make new posts to announce updates to the first post.

[TheouAegis]

What do you mean overlapping tiles? Where at in CV3 specifically?

And you know reVamp has all the tiles and tile squares pre-assembled. You just have to open YY-CHR and Photoshop then just do paint-by-numbers, literally.

[Corpsecrank]

What do you mean overlapping tiles? Where at in CV3 specifically?

And you know reVamp has all the tiles and tile squares pre-assembled. You just have to open YY-CHR and Photoshop then just do paint-by-numbers, literally.

They did it all over in cv3 actually. I noticed it in cv1 also though but not until later stages in the game like 5 and 6. Basically they have large tiles that get chopped in half or that get overlapped against another tile either half over or 1/4 over and it gives the illusion that there is less repeating patterns. Pretty much the only way I can describe it. They stretched the small amount of tiles they had to make things look as good as possible and you see it happen far more often in cv3 as it contained a lot more levels and stuff. So since they had to go that far they ended up finding a creative way to really stretch graphics resources without being really obvious that they were recycling so much of it so often.

About the tiles already existing. I had considered for about 5 seconds simply yanking everything from the rom files and coloring it. I find it to be a lot less work doing it this way. Coloring every tile is a lot of work I would also have no reference colors to adjust from. I am trying to make all the colors on these tiles flow together nice rather than harshly contrasting one another which the original colors did from stage to stage. Difference is in game you have no easy way to see each stages color scheme side by side to really compare that way. Toss them on a sheet and its enough to make you vomit though lol.

I am also pushing these tiles in a bit of a different direction. Modern engines can handle transparency and gradients and more colors than an nes etc. I want to take advantage of that and modernize the tiles. It should still feel like the old school cv you know and love but look a bit better.

Also if anyone is wondering I am still a couple of days off from posting my update Trying hard to find some time to clean up the materials and post them here.

[TheouAegis]

That's not technically overlapping tiles. The NES wasn't capable of overlapping tiles (moving, yes; overlapping, not that I'm aware of). A tile is an 8x8 pixel graphic. Each tile is arranged in a 32x32 pixel tile square assembly. Each tile square assembly is comprised of a 2x2 attribute table which defines the colors of each 16x16 pixel area of tiles. There are a maximum of 256 tile square assemblies per stage. Each stage is comprised of two persistent CHR offsets (a set of 64 tiles each) which hold shared tiles (such as sky and shadows, as well as doors and spikes) as well as common sprites (like hearts and coin purses); in addition there are two dedicated CHR offsets which hold the tiles "unique" to the current room. These CHR offsets overwrite each other and only two are ever loaded at any one time. This is why when you walk through a door there are occasionally graphical glitches, because the game is drawing the next room using the previous room's CHR offsets. That's actually where stairs come into play. If you want a drastic change in scenery, you use stairs; but the tile square assemblies still don't change. All of stage 1 in CV3 for example, even the cathedral, is defined by a unique set of 255 (actually less than that) tile square assemblies. The game simply reads the tile square assembly value from the ROM, writes it to the RAM temporarily, reads the value of each tile square assembly, then retrieves the list of which tiles comprise that tile square assembly. It then reads the attribute table and draws that tile to the screen with the appropriate colors.

What you're seeing as "overlapping tiles" is just mixed-and-matched tiles in separate tile square assemblies. Open CV3 in reVamp. The designer of that program did a wonderful job making the tile square assembly editor very user-friendly. You will see how Konami made everything that way. Personally, I'm always amazed at how game designers compiled all those tiles. Many of the tiles are vague and abstract outside the tile square assemblies.

Oh, and Konami didn't even always use tile square assemblies. In areas like the intro, the name entry screen, and the password screen, as well as the Prayer scene, the backgrounds were defined tile-by-tile, no tile square assemblies at all. So no, there are no overlapping tiles.


What's even crazier is only the upper-left tile defined by each attribute table actually defines the collision map. This might be what's throwing you off.

A through D corresponds to one tile square assembly. Each label is over a single 8x8 tile. That sole tile defines the solidity of the 16x16 pixel area around it.

[Corpsecrank]

No that makes a lot more sense now. I see what you mean by the appearance of overlapping by mixing parts of them. It actually kind of helps in a way. Maybe I will go back and look some things over I may be able to improve this a lot.

[Aridale]

I think you mean 16x16 in a 2x2 area to make a 32x32 tile assembly

[TheouAegis]

No i meant what ever I said before. CV3 defined the TS by tiles, not metatiles. Only the attribute table was by metatiles. Other games might have taken the metatile-TSA route, but CV3 from what I remember in the code didn't. It might have not warranted enough memory saving in their eyes.

[Corpsecrank]

I keep wanting to dig into this with the information I have now but I am slammed with work at the moment. As soon as I get a free day I am going to go back and re-asses things here.

[Corpsecrank]

Figured I better give some kind of update on things. I plan on doing a straight tile rip though I see no use for it unless someone wanted accuracy. I am going to include the original tiles in the original colors because of that. I am also going to release along side of that the modified tiles that I think will be of more use especially with modern tools etc.

I am currently sick and have been for a couple days now. But I think I am getting better and I am not getting hit so hard with work so I hope to be back at this soon.