clarification on swapping screen tilesets

Mugi

Member
hey all,

I could use some clarification on a couple things as i started designing my overworld map for my game (platformer) and with scrolling coming with 4.1.0, im a little unsure of how this will work out.

here's my example map im working on:
example.png


how i was planning to set this out, is that the screens marked with red are scrolling stages, there will be a short forest stage at the top
and one of the screens has a pit you can jump down on, to end up into the cavern stage. I know that vertical scrolling is not a thing, so the 3 screens you are falling down would not be scrolling, but my question concerns on whether or not you can change the screen tiles between screens on a scrolling stage or not.

in my example picture, there are 2 scrolling parts on the bottom, a 2-screen long "cavern" and a 4 screens long "temple"
my idea was to create the screen that is between the 2 so that it would have a tileset that contains pieces of both the cavern and the temple tiles, to make a screen that looks like it's transitioning from the cavern to the temple.

but can i make the whole bottom part one single scrolling stage, and still swap either the whole tileset, or just the screentiles for this particular screen alone, or would i have to do it as indicated on the example, and make the "transition" room a separate non-scrolling room in order to give it unique tiles ?
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
I am not sure either. Most simple answer would be that all the scrolling screens would use the same tileset... But I think we will know soon (tonight, tomorrow) as the 4.1 will be out ;)
 

Mugi

Member
Im currently designing based on that idea, just to be on the safe side....
Guess we'll see.
 

chronosv2

New member
As I understand it from some of the discussions on Facebook, all screens linked by scrolling must use the same assets. Anything that causes a full screen load (like the vertical drop) can have different resources as it's a screen load boundary.

So any screens in your example linked with red would be required to have the same monster set and tiles. Any separated by a boundary that isn't scrolling can be new tiles/monsters.
 

Mugi

Member
that's pretty much what i though, as it's the logical outcome.
more or less means i will have to do it as indicated on th example picture and make the "transition room" a non-scrolling room with it's own tileset.

thanks. Now i can get back to tileset design :p
 

chronosv2

New member
We don't quite know how it works yet but you might not need the transition screen so long as there's a screen that doesn't scroll right and the next screen doesn't scroll left. :)
I'll let you know what I find out when we've got the chance to tinker with 4.1!
 

Kasumi

New member
NES answer: There are 256 tiles in memory at any given time for the background. Suppose we're standing somewhere that uses all 256 tiles, and we scroll right where there are supposed to be some more different tiles. Something will get displayed wrong. Using more than 256 tiles in a horizontally scrolling level requires very careful management of the sets during level and tileset creation. (It's easier in a vertically scrolling level, but not easy.)

In your example, imagine you have a 256 tile cavern set, and a 256 tile temple set. For the part you wanted to transition, you'd have to be super careful (the moment the temple tiles start to appear, you have to only use indices 0-127 of the cavern tiles, and make sure indices 0-127 of the temple tiles aren't used yet. You can only use tiles 0-127 of the temple tiles when the cavern tiles are fully offscreen, because any tiles that shared a number in both sets can't be on screen at the same time or when some of the set flips, something's gonna look wrong.. At least, that's one example setup.)

NES Maker's cartridge type has four tilesets it can easily swap to at any given time. It seems like the general plan is for it to be used for tile animation. But if you ditch tile animation, you could in theory have your three sets and swap to them as described above. But you'd have to code WHEN to make the swaps in addition to making sure the tile indices in the sets and screens aligned. And that's the "easy" way. The harder way can transition much smoother and keep tile animation, but uses a very valuable resource (graphics update time) and still needs the set/screen index alignment to be planned.

I kind of doubt NES Maker will help you do this, it's a tough programming/design task to help a user align all these things.
 

Mugi

Member
i was mostly wondering if they changed the nesmaker UI to actually lock you into a tileset on scrolling stages or not, because currently it allows changing it for each screen, so if it keeps doing that, then how was it handled.

now, i could in theory craft 2 tilesets, one for the cave and one for the temple, and in the transition screen throw in a REALLY carefully designed 3rd one to not upset the existing elements on the screen, i do have a preliminary design for this actually done already. The questions was more or less, does nes maker allow that to be done out of the box or not.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Personally, I don't think it's locked in the UI... so if you mix tilesets in your scrolling screens, yeah, you might have strange results at runtime ;)
 

Mugi

Member
if it does allow it to be done, it will be an extremely interesting excercise of resource management to create screens that switch elements during scroll.
man... NOW im getting excited!
 
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