Tiles... they (usually) aren't that hard, guys.

[NemZ]

Holiday threw me off so it's going to be a while before the next update.

I suspect it's possible to work around that with a fixed framed-in zone of movement by repurposing the 'scrolling' memory area and line interrupts, but that would likely be more trouble than it's worth.  Certainly in all other MM games Beed's revised version would be far more likely to be seen.

[NemZ]

Lesson 8: Considering The 3rd Dimension

So, finally bringing this back home.  The only thing left to worry about is how to convert the stage to work in 3D for our specific purposes here.



First off, any map with water needs a quick recolor of the water textures.  For whatever reason using the same animated tiles over and over again is just a tradition, so let's not fight it.  Generally best to stick to the darker colors, as that leaves the lightest one only on the 'falling' tiles, which makes them seem more active.

Moving on, mostly we just need to consider ceilings and floors to match the various solid surfaces.  Generally it's fine to just keep these pretty simple, though it helps to have a little variation just to keep things from getting too stale.  Some simple rocks (generally with little to no black as too much of it on the floor causes issues for some folks), a couple of metal-ish tiles, maybe some bricks even though that's really more of a wall texture... not too hard.  Start it simple and then try and work in a variation, usually on a 32x32 block or larger.  We also need one for those 'oyster pod' things, which is a little more involved but can be slapped together well enough by just doing 1/4 and copy/paste/rotate a few times to fill it out.  Also made a couple of open/shut ends for any exposed pipe ends.

More challenging, we also need to consider horizontal surfaces that would be hidden by the game's perspective that aren't just normal walls.  In this case, this means the somewhat problematic fans.  I made a base without the blades first using the non-moving part of the fans as a guide, then added the fan blades on a separate layer so I could tweak with them and not mess up the common section.  Only so much you can do here, but giving it a clear direction helps sell it.  I tried to base it on matching the 3-frame animation from before if viewed from the right.



Finally I thought it might be a good touch to make it possible to actually make a few of those tall crazy pole things as terrain rather than just a background, so there's a couple of textures with animation loops to build them, the little 'pods' on the side, and a simple 'pole' texture to stretch between them.

Also don't forget a few of the tiles made earlier that didn't work out for the actual stage due to NES limitations, such as the fences and inside of the columns.  I think that's got just about everything covered.

So, I guess that's about it.  Start to finish, step by step.  It's been fun!

Please don't be intimidated by all this, the vast majority of maps are not going to be anywhere near this difficult to convert.  If you've followed the whole thing maybe it's time to give it a try yourself, see how it goes!

If there are any further questions about my process, maybe something I glossed over too quick?  Let me know and I'll see if I can help make it clear.

[Hallan Parva]

Very very nice tutorial! Sorry I didn't really butt in while it was in progress, I guess I didn't really have anything urgent to bring up.

I do have one question, how would you best approach near-full custom tilesets? (Things too disgustingly high-res to effectively reduce just through recoloring; making textures based on something already 3D like Super Smash Bros.; other things done with loose references or from scratch.) What sort of references would you recommend? Anything in particular that would help with planning (e.g. would making a mock-up 2D map be good advice)?

[NemZ]

First off... I made a glaring omission in neglecting to make a top to the... whatever those things are, and also decided i didn't care for the way I did the bottom earlier so here's one final update:

I do have one question, how would you best approach near-full custom tilesets? (Things too disgustingly high-res to effectively reduce just through recoloring; making textures based on something already 3D like Super Smash Bros.; other things done with loose references or from scratch.) What sort of references would you recommend? Anything in particular that would help with planning (e.g. would making a mock-up 2D map be good advice)?

That's One question?    I think I'll have to break that down a little bit.

With remaking much higher resolution stuff the recoloring method does still work, but you're likely to have more involvement in the 'fine tuning' stage afterwords to try and preserve as much detail as possible.  That really comes down to developing a sense of what the most recognizable features are then making sure they get preserved even if it means losing detail elsewhere or changing the relative size of things.  Many times with such things you're going to have to resize the textures to fit the x16 pixel scale as well, and in a case like that I advise you to do the color downsampling while at full size, then make sure to use the 'nearest neighbor' option when scaling down to prevent your colors from blurring.

When remaking something 3D (such as the powered up tiles I made some time ago) you'll need to mentally break then up into 'sides' if they aren't conveniently low-poly to begin with.  If you have a good reference this isn't too bad, but in that case I couldn't find stage maps and didn't actually own the game so I had to base the whole thing on YouTube let's play vids.  Quite a pain to do, I'm sure you can immagine!  On the other hand the game does give you a sense of what the top/bottom of things should like like in that case, so it gives you a little help in the later phases of the tileset.

In both the above cases the best references available are obviously the maps themselves, either ripped, while playing, or from a vid.  Just go through the steps the same as in the tutorial, breaking things up into color groups and applying the color reduction technique.  You may have to make some major compromises here... again, it comes down to deciding what is most important for preserving the overall 'feel' of the stage, what makes it unique and recognizable.  Keep in mind what I did with the mm&b Cold Man example, using just 3 colors from a palette per tile with different focus colors to create the illusion of having more colors available than you really do.  There's also another option which isn't very megaman-ish in style and won't look good at all up close as in mm8bdm, but it's possible to using stippling of different color pixels in a regular proportions to simulate a color that is a mix of those thus used, just as monitors and home printers actually only use 3-4 colors in combination to make full color.

If you're making something from scratch that's a whole different ballgame, but some of the tutorial steps can be used in reverse to guide you.  I recommend make some random sketches of sample terrain, just brainstorming the kinds of things you want the stage to contain, then apply the color groups to those items.  You're going to have to make some choices here such as how colorful you want the stage to be, if it will be dark or bright, etc.  a major concern is how much interplay you expect to have between elements, such as will you have elements that cross over from one color group to another so you can have, say, trees that have your sky showing behind them but also fade into grass and stuff at the base, in which case you'll need to have common colors other than the 'base' (usually black) that they all share to make that transition smooth.  If you want to use animated tiles you'll likely need to set aside a palette or two for just that purpose.

Here, I'll give you a sneak peak of something from the fangame I've been working on to illustrate that a little:  a sample screenshot from Marine Man's stage (still in progress, mind you):



If you break that down you'll find examples of using one palette for multiple color areas as well as multiple crossover colors to make the sky work with various bits of things overlapping or peaking into it.  There's no planned tile animation for this section, but some hijinks will be pulled for that sunrise to come to full fruition as the stage progresses.

[crazytobuildmc]

OK, NemZ! Good tutorial, but I have a problem. I want to make an 8-bit remake of part of the tileset for the final level of Mega Man Zero 4, but I have no map to help me! How will I do it? Could you spare me a map? I want to do the foreground for the orange section with the jittery background. Thanks!

[Beed28]

Here you go:

http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/GBA/MegaMan ... okCore.png

[Knux]

It's a shame that VGmaps is mostly garbage when it comes to backgrounds. You have sprites in the way, missing backgrounds and animations, and even paler palettes in the maps most of the time. The last one is only a real problem for 8-bit maps, but my point still stands.

[ThelegendaryTom]

I found out something very interesting lately... The tile sets from RM7FC seem to use the same technique as the one here. Well, I thought it was cool ;P

[NemZ]

That's not an accident.  

[ThelegendaryTom]

Do you think this method is possible to do on the Legends series backgrounds for a fan-game? Or do you think you would need to re-sprite them to be smaller?

[NemZ]

^
I would assume you'd have to shrink them down a bit, but that can be done with just simple resizing, though you may have to work a bit to get the details crisp again afterwards.

anyway...

To explain that thing with the miniboss a little better, you need to understand that the system memory actually holds two screens worth of data at once (or more for later games with ram support capabilities built into the cartridge).  The extra area is used to preload the screens in front of you so that as you move in whatever direction there's a buffer between the visible edge and the tiles being loaded.  Palletes often aren't applied until right before the tiles are fully scrolled on screen to save memory, as this area was meant to be cut off the real visible edges, but on widescreens or with emulators you can sometimes see this half-processed data as you walk.

The idea I had in mind is that as long as the player is stuck in a single room the scrolling data is essentially free to use for whatever, such as displaying a static boss background.  There is another feature called line interrupts that tell the display to read data out of sequence, often for things like static status bars.  In this case I want to set up a designated chunk of the middle of the screen (from the notched-in corners of the purple rocks up to just below the maroon ceiling rocks) that draws from the scrolling area rather than the working area using line interrupts, and by changing where the interrupt data is read from on a static image it should be possible to allow it to move in 8 directions seemingly independent of the background without needing the extra ram. 

It would create an extra delay before allowing movement into the next screen while the scrolling mode resets, but I wanted to use that for a quick 'water draining' effect of the boss room as an airlock, and also changing the jumping physics back to normal when the sequence ends.