The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

Note: this post was intended for 2024-09-01, but RMN being down for an extended period prevented posting until now.

This month I decided to add a new chipset (the set of tiles which are used to make maps) to Forgotten Gates. Where the existing chipset I've been using is for a forest environment like the Lost Woods, this new one is for fields. Each chipset (at least the ones intended for use in the random dungeon system) has to be functionally more or less the same -- consistent in which tiles are walkable space, which are walls, etc. Also, there have to be six different walkable tile types, one for each of the magic elements in the combat system, although I'm purposely trying to vary which tile is associated with which element from one chipset to another. I was able to use rips from A Link to the Past pretty heavily, so this chipset at least didn't turn out too difficult. I did have to make a few original bits, though.

A few of the tile types make use of RM2K3's built-in animation capability, which is usually used for 'water' tiles. In the forest chipset, I ended up actually making all of them appear static -- I may go back and improve some of them eventually. In the field chipset, the LttP rips provided me with an easy animated option in the form of bouncing flowers (why they bounce who can say, but it looks cool). When I tried them, I discovered a problem I hadn't noticed before: when two different types of 'water' tiles are placed next to each other, they appear to meld together instead of having edges between them. That makes sense if they're actually depicting water (like an ocean tile with a whirlpool next to it), but it wasn't correct for my purposes, where the animated tiles are supposed to be distinct types of ground. :/a For a while I thought I'd have to make a design rule that the animated tiles can't be placed next to each other and remake any existing rooms which break this rule, but then I remembered a hack I'd accidentally discovered a while ago. It turns out that if you use the map editor's area select-and-move tool on some tiles, they won't change the appearance of their edges to match the way they'd be drawn if you placed them the ordinary way. :o So I was able to draw the animated tiles in the midst of non-animated ones, then move them to where they're needed. B)

Each of the walkable tile types also needs a corresponding battle background. I mostly make the battle backgrounds by copy-pasting the actual tiles into a base background, so that wasn't too difficult. The animated tile set me off on another unexpected improvement campaign. Since battle backgrounds are static, I couldn't really have the flowers bouncing in that...OR COULD I? +.+ It occurred to me that if I used the 'frames' battle background type, and made the back frame a moving swathe of the animated tile in its various states, then I could make them appear animated by having a static front frame with holes showing through to the back. :D

So I gave that a try, but it turned out there was a problem: the maximum movement of the frames normally allowed is 8 pixels on each axis, but the tiles are 16x16 pixels. So it was DynRPG to the rescue once again! I updated the DynDatabaseOverride plugin to allow changing the frame movement speed (and everything else about Terrain data while I was at it) so that I could set it to something outside the bounds allowed by the RM2K3 database editor. It turned out that when the frame movement is set to something above 8, instead of adding to it, it doubles -- so setting it to 9 makes it move 16 pixels, 10 makes it move 32 pixels, etc. Fortunately that works just fine for my purposes, and I was able to achieve the animation I wanted.