TRANSPARENT WATER WITHOUT PICTURES OR CHARSETS.

If you've played some of the best SNES era RPG's, you've no doubt noticed how good the water effects are. Take FF6 for example. In the towns, caves, forests... there is water. It is transparent water, letting you see the bottom of the river bed, or the rock wall behind it, etc. These effects add a LOT of atmosphere to your game, but almost no one uses them.



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Transparent Water without pictures or charsets.
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Step 1. Find the water tiles you want to use. For this tutorial, I will be using the RPG Maker XP water autotile "T_Ocean1"



One of the only downsides to this method is that it only allows 3 animation frames per tile. So I have to reduce the above picture into 3 unique water tiles, then I'll arrange them side by side:




Step 2. Make the image transparent. You can do this using a variety of freeware programs. I personally use Paint Shop Pro X. Generally speaking you will want to set the transparency to 50%, but you can adjust this to your liking.


Step 3. Arrange all the tiles that will have water on or over them. Generally speaking, you will want water on the following tiles (or ones similar) You are limited to 12 tiles in this method. Below there are only 10 unique tiles shown.




Step 4. Now arrange those tiles like this.




Step 5. OK, leave this for a second and go back to the water tiles you made in Step 2. You need to make another copy that will "wrap" around the cliffs, if there are any. Like this:



So what you are looking at is a screenshot of me "erasing" most of the water tile copy. This is for the water that is at the "brim". Notice that in each tile, the water level rises about 1 pixel. This will simulate living water in your game. Now I just need to do the same for the left/right cliff corners. They will have slight curves to them.


Step 6. Now it is time to take the transparent water tiles and paste them over your cliff tiles. The end result should look something like this:




Step 7. Now place these tiles in the "water tiles" area of a chipset. The below is an example RTP edit done by myself (I've shrunken it to avoid plagiarism)




Step 8. Now comes the fun part. Import your new chipset into RM2k(3) and start a new map with this tileset. What you are aiming to do is draw with the water tiles until you see the tiles you want appear. Draw vertical lines, horizontal lines, 4-way intersections and 1 tile water drops in order to summon the 4 water tiles!



The yellow circles indicate the pure tiles that have been "summoned". They are the ones you are after!!


Step 9. Hold Shift and right click over a pure tile. Then, still holding shift, paste it somewhere else. Do this for every pure tile until you have reconstructed the cliffs/whatever.



It takes some getting used to, extracting all the tiles. But once you learn it, it's cake afterwards.


Step 10. Simply design your map and use shift+click to use the water tiles wherever they are needed. The end result? Here is a quick demo I made of a port town.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGsaSf0KdCM


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FAQ
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Q. You say you are limited to 12 tiles. What about the other tiles that we normally use for things like waterfalls?

A:Not only do they have 4 animation frames (as opposed to 3), but they move about 4 times as fast.


Q. What if I want to put things like rocks, vines, etc., under the water?

A. There are two ways to do this. The simplest way is to make the rocks, vines, etc. events on top of the water, set them to below hero, and make them transparent. This will make them appear to be under the water. Another option is to make a charset of a 16x16 water tile. Place the rock or whatever as normal, then make the water event over it.




-giantdonkeykongteam (GDKT)