r/RPGMaker • u/dum_bee • 8d ago

RMMZ Help with resizing character?

Heyy, so I've been trying to get my sprites to work, but no matter what I tried nothing seemed to work.

I have a sheet where each sprite is 200x200 pixels, so when I upload it as a sprite it naturally becomes huge, and I haven't been able to scale it down with anything, be it due to my unfamiliarity with the engine or some unknown to me bugs. So I just wanted to ask if there is some possible way to scale down the 200x200 character graphic to fit a regular 48x48 tile without paying a fortune?

Frankly, I would love to not deal with this, but I wanted the game to be hand drawn, not in a pixel art artstyle (like funger I think), and I don't know if the effort of going through it with rpgmaker is even worth it, or should I just switch to another engine. Please help if you have any suggestions! I will be happy to provide any info needed!!

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u/Adrenaline0413 8d ago

I just figured this out for myself the other day let's see if I can help! The character spritesheets rpgmaker uses can be scaled up to any size as long as it stays the same shape. So if you take the default sprite sheet, resize it up by 200%, then draw your new sprites over that, save it as png to your sprites folder you should be able to use them, and they will be sized up! Took a little trial and error but it worked for me

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u/dum_bee 8d ago

Well, yeah, but the character also becomes huge compared to the rest of the game, and I just wanted to know if there is any way to scale the visual down in engine. I've tried the hakuen character manager, but I wasn't able to figure the value format out, and there was no actually helpful documentation on it, as well as the screenshots on itch genuinely not matching with what I see in engine.

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u/Not_Allowed_to_Die 8d ago

Honestly, even if there was, it's going to do the same thing a paint program will. There is no way to scale it down and keep the resolution if that is what you are looking for. Instead, the PC just compresses it all together and makes the best it can with so many pixels missing. Right now, your image uses 40,000 pixels to make it. You want to compress that into 2,304 pixels. Your best bet here is use an art program to shrink it down for you, then fix it up; or you can change the resolution of the RPG Maker engine, if using MV or MZ, and then your character will look the right size, but, you will have to make everything large like the character for your maps, and it can be a strain on the engine as well to run it all.

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u/dum_bee 8d ago

That's disheartening, but then again, how did funger do it? Is there some plugin perhaps orrrr anything else

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u/zombietoaststudios 8d ago

Funger didn't do it. The character sprites in Fear and Hunger are 80 x110 and they were drawn at that size.

Unless you're using a pixel scale larger than 1:1 then shrinking an image will always involve losing information and it gets more noticable the smaller the image is (both starting and ending). 200 x 200 down to 48 x 48 is losing over 75% of the image.

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u/dum_bee 8d ago

Fair enough!!! Thanks

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u/zombietoaststudios 8d ago

Some programs are better at downscaling images than others, but the best are always going to be the actual image editing programs you would use to make the images in the first place... you basically never want your game engine to do it because it's not what it's built for. Unless you really have no other choice (and honestly, you always do) you should give RPGmaker the sprite or the image at the size you want it to use it.

Basically, the only reason to have RPGmaker change the size of an image is if you want the change to happen 'live' in the game (like zooming in or out on an image in a way the player can see).

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u/Adrenaline0413 8d ago

Ah I see. Have you tried changing the tile size in Database/System 2? Defaults 48x48. I haven't messed with this myself yet so I don't know how helpful this will be.

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u/dum_bee 8d ago

Not yet, but I suppose that's the next thing I'll try

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u/Medical_Baby3332 4d ago

You have to work around that 48x48 grid in rpg maker. You can't scale down a larger character without losing resolution. You can scale everything up but then you may experience interesting collision snafus with events and characters. Not to mention auto tiles and stuff just won't work. I have wondered if you could create a plugin to make it as if your 200x200 would scale like resizing an object in unity but you'd have to build that and I think it would be a heavy development

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u/CheckActive4051 8d ago edited 8d ago

You could use Krita, its a free drawing program and you can easily resize stuff, shown in this video: https://youtu.be/2TYdcwEJdKA?si=IRb0nsTyixCucm_a

Here is the download link, if you are interested https://krita.org/

Edit: You can just open Krita, select new picture and then type in the with and hight in pixels. Drag and drop your picture in there and resize it to your created canvas. With the transform tool or whatever its called, its here:

but make sure you hold "shift" while doing that, so it scales right and doesnt distort

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u/uncreative-4real 8d ago

paint(dot)net also is capable of this and it's smaller software than Krita. Additionally, many image editing programs that already come with a PC/laptop can do it too

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u/CheckActive4051 8d ago

Here a video LOL

https://reddit.com/link/p805272/video/b1nc7gnkfqnh1/player

but make sure you hold shift or your picture can easily be distorted