VERSALIA'S PROFILE

Updated Bedroom: Now with 50% more diagonal tiles, sensible kitchen chairs and a FREE! Aisling.

If you're going to be seeing a lot of this room it might as well make as much sense as it can. :B

author=catmitts
Basically I guess that nowadays even indie devs don't have to worry as much about brevity in graphics but it's always interesting to see people manage to suggest a lot with just a little, and how a few carefully chosen tiles can suggest an entire world with little effort while the sense of place generated by detailed ripped graphics etc can fall apart at the first misplaced tile.

You should look at the node system Craze and Karsu are using in the V&V Remake.

author=LockeZ
But reducing the reward is... a method of actively discouraging them.

no no no no wrong

the reward is incentive. lowering the reward is lowering the incentive. lowering the reward is at worst passive discouragement. having a powerful monster pop up to buttrape them is actively discouraging them.

author=LockeZ
Oh, it is possible in VX? I was under the impression that VX had a maximum number of tiles and a maximum number of tilesets, which makes it difficult for any alternate or edited tileset to actually offer more versatility than the RTP. I guess I'm vaguely aware that there's some sort of script you can use to partially get around it but I never did check up on the details. (I use XP these days.)

I have no idea why they decided to F tileset functionality in the A, but thankfully scripting solves everything. Basically you copy+paste the script in, and tell it which tiles to use for which maps. Done.

DwarvenFortress -> Swap default tileset out to DwarvenTileSet.png

The annoying part is making the map, if DwarvenTiles are way different. TileA is your 'base' layer. Save a copy of TileA. Make DwarvenTileSet into TileA. Make your map out of TileA/Dwarven. Replace TileA/Dwarven with TileA/Original. Your Dwarven maps won't appear to make any sense in the editor (just like if you opened it with 2k3 and changed the Tileset the map is made out of) but it will make sense in the game when the script automatically does the above swapping for you.

I make a new project, with the DwarvenTile in it, and never change it back to the default tile. I can make all edits to the Dwarven maps in the new project, copy+paste them into the original. It still won't look like it makes sense, but I was making correct edits.

So mildly annoying, yes. But it works. (I consider this a fair tradeoff for everything else VX lets me do ... it's the ONLY thing that has become more complicated for me.)

author=LockeZ
When I make maps, I admittedly sometimes *start* with an RTP tileset. When I don't, I start with some other simple tileset. But then when I get to a spot on the map and decide, "it would look good to have a taller vase here," I edit the tileset and add a taller vase to it. And then when I decide, "These vases need to each have a different type of plant in them," I edit the tileset and add 10 vases with different types of plants in them. That's how I build maps. There are other ways, but this is my method, and I like it because I'm never limited to any tileset's contents, so I don't have to sacrifice integrity. It takes a lot longer though. And it's borderline impossible in VX.

It's funny because I was 100% agreeing with you, and this is also how I do my mapping, until you said it was borderline impossible in VX. Which it isn't. Because that is what I am using. Successfully. But that aside:

The effort you described is what I would also consider reasonable. All of those things are well within any given person's range of ability (downloading tons of rips etc). So I guess I WOULD hold it against someone if they didn't even bother to do that much; I just see, WAY too often, someone who is obviously trying to execute something their tileset can't live up to; and in that case, I'd rather you have stuck to the realm of safety. I can, in fact, think of at least one specific screenshot I saw lately where the mountain tiles did not match up smoothly at all, and the creator didn't seem to care. Try and edit the tileset, OR use it the way it was meant to be used - don't hack things together.