MAP MAKING 101

<SHIFT> TUTORIAL

Glossary:
Map tile--a square in the grid of your WIP map
Mapchip--the tile currently "held" by your cursor
Ground-layer--the Layer A tile "held" by your cursor, ignoring tables, fences and Layer B-E tiles
Autotile--chips that have dynamic borders and corners
Painting--placing mapchips on the map tiles
Palette--the window on the left of the map editor that contains all of the lonely mapchips (also, quite possibly spelled incorrectly)

• When you click a map tile normally, your current mapchip is painted on that space. Adjacent autotiles will spawn borders and corners.
• When you click a map tile while holding <SHIFT> and your current ground-layer mapchip is an autotile, the painted space will be the center of the autotile (no borders or corners).
• When you click a map tile while holding <SHIFT> and your current ground-layer mapchip is not an autotile, the painted space will not spawn adjacent autotile borders and corners.
• When you right-click a map tile, your current mapchip changes to hold all layers on that tile. The dynamic borders of autotiles (including tables, fences, waterfalls, etc.) are ignored and painting with the mapchip is like painting with a single A-layer tile from the palette
• When you right-click a map tile while holding <SHIFT>, your current mapchip changes to hold all layers on that tile. The dynamic borders of autotiles are kept until click again without holding <SHIFT>. When painting with this mapchip, holding down <SHIFT> will draw that chip with its exact borders and corners from the cloned map tile. Very useful for waterfall, bridge, wall and ceiling edges.

Please note this information is universally true from RM2k to RMVX. The best way to assimilate it is to TRY IT OUT. One of the easiest methods of utilizing the last bullet is to make a map and draw each autotile out with the circle tool, big enough so that you can grab every corner, edge and minicorner. You might also want to make a cross so that you can grab tiles with more than one edge.

MODIFY: This image uses shift-clicking well! It's not terribly complex (it doesn't get that way until you have maze walls over bridges over water, really), but yeah. Credits to Feld/MOG/The Sixth Jackson/whoever.

Uh, it's the same idea.

The design of any map is universal no matter what engine you're using. There are workarounds for specific engines to pull of certain effects, but that isn't really a map design issue.

edit: I mean that is like asking how someone should design a dungeon in RMVX. Or how they should design their battle system. You should not be separating design based on the engine you're using.
The shift key allows you to place auto tiles in select places on your map in VX.

Uh, no, it's really not.

For one thing, you go from having one ground layer and one objects layer to having FIVE DIFFERENT "LAYERS" which arguably no longer function as layers in the traditional sense at all; and chip can have one tile from A and one tile from B-E on it, but not one tile from B and one from C, for instance.

For two, the old "chipsets" or "tilesets" are gone and you need to find some way to fit all of the tiles you want to use for the ENTIRE GAME into those five layers.

For three, the proportions of everything are different and charactersets and by default walls are one tile tall.

For four, autoshadows.

Fifthly, autotiles.

So IMHO RMVX mapping is PRETTY FUCKING DIFFERENT than mapping for rm2k(3). I have done a lot of both and I can honestly say the feel is very different.

You missed my point completely.

I didn't want my tutorial to be about layers, shadows, and autotiles. I thought I made that clear. Drawing a map, figuring out it's size and layout, and how you go about designing it is what I was aiming for.

Specific engines do things differently in terms of how mapping is done (yes I have used RMVX and know how different it is), but the design is a universal thing.