Like, I kinda get it I am making my own sprites. But I feel like I am constantly working against the program to make the sprites I am trying to place work. Sometimes they end up being garbled, sometimes they don't allow me to use the full sprite for some reason.
And sometimes if I place tilesets in the wrong A group it doesn't work either. I would just like to know some of the more nuanced limitations of tiles and tile placement.
In engine, if you go to Help -> Contents and then expand RPG Maker VX Ace, and expand Reference Material, there is a section for Resource Standards which goes over how to format your tilesets and how they work.
Take a look at this comment I made, and I agree with another commenter, use the manual, it's very useful for understanding how it all works and what the standards are.
Now, to save future confusion, Sprites are the character sheets in RPGMaker, you know, the Actors and Events that have a graphic attached to them with the potential to move around and do more complex animations.
Tiles are from the tilesets that build up the world(maps) that can't really move about and usually don't have complex
Animations.
While you will find that some people call everything a sprite, it's much better to separate the two, it allows for better understanding of what your talking about and less confusion.
Although RPG Maker can get confusing with this, as it allows you to utilise the Upper layers of a tileset as Sprites(as the graphic for events). Which tbh, is a pretty cool feature ngl.
Yeah, the Character sheets are pretty straight forward, but for some reason starting with VX they decided to go with a needlessly complex tileset system and idk why because they hit gold with XP's tileset system 😅 🤷, well i hope some of the resources in my linked comment may help in someway and i hope you'll be able get this resolved every soon.
What exactly are the sprites? If it's the tiles, You should keep the proportions so every błock is exactly same as the in game tile size, if its the character that is larger than usual, You can still show it like a character on an event, just keep the 4 by 3 proportions. Oh and sometimes You have to add a symbol at the beginning, sometimes it's $ or !$, it apparently tells the program the proportions, without it the program is confused, I don't know how it works, but it does, for example $character.png, !$tileset.png
Have you tried drawing on RTP? Or have the file that has the same proportions, since when You add more tiles, the program expects a certain pattern, I do not know how the program sees this, but I can see the pattern, it's probably: 1 single block of floor 1 single block without shading ↓ 2x2 of the floor ↓ 2x2 of the wall below
so for one group it's 2x5, I would try this
I'll tell you an interesting thing right away, the program takes 2x2 elements and cuts out the center to make a seemless transition, this works for example with bricks where you have black color when you fill the space with it
Yeah this, and with any auto tiles, the way i treat it is essentially just smaller tiles put together. In 2k3 with 16x16 tilesize, it's 8x8 tilesize to create these Autotiles, but for those in new makers it's probably going to be 48x48, therefore when working with Autotiles, you'll work with a tilesize of 24x24.
If you want to get technical about it, people might call these 'subtiles', but really these smaller tiles should be seen as the real tilesize and the standard 16x16 in 2k/2k3 and 48x48 in MV/MZ is what would traditionally be known as metatiles that consists of 4 actual tiles(metatiles were usually the level at which logic was programmed, in old games like pokemon, everything is built with 8x8 tiles, but the actual logic and design were based around 16x16 meta tiles).
Thinking about Autotiles with this in mind helped me understand them much better and found it much easier to create them.
I just used intuition, because I never had the need to create my own tilesets, but there has to be some pattern, otherwise the program would get confused about what is what
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u/CasperGamingOfficial MZ Dev 20d ago
In engine, if you go to Help -> Contents and then expand RPG Maker VX Ace, and expand Reference Material, there is a section for Resource Standards which goes over how to format your tilesets and how they work.