"Painted" maps

[KonigDerZerfall]

Is it possible to shift away from the standard tile-by-tile world approach and "paint" the maps using terrain-pass to block off the areas while still keeping it feel free? I suppose the closest thing I can give you is Star Ocean 2's town maps as such. I know you can do this in RPG Maker by way of parallaxing. Is there a way that our maps can look this way as well, while not completely conforming to 'the grid'?

[Kibbelz]

@raeven is the only user im aware of who has got results from a painted map method. I believe he does it by painting objects and drawing them ontop of a ground texture. Im not a fan of a painted style myself and i think the advantage of tiles massively outweigh painting but each to their own  check out his game here:

Goodluck!

[Beefy Kasplant]

Blocking areas will always be tile based. So it is possible, but you're still going to have to align the whole maps with the tiles, making the tile approach easier in the long run. 

[jcsnider]

2 minutes ago, Kasplant said:

Blocking areas will always be tile based. So it is possible, but you're still going to have to align the whole maps with the tiles, making the tile approach easier in the long run. 

 

It's not easy but I don't see why it couldn't be possible. It is a lot harder.. but it also makes the painted method that much more rewarding.. if you can pull it off

[KonigDerZerfall]

2 minutes ago, Kasplant said:

Blocking areas will always be tile based. So it is possible, but you're still going to have to align the whole maps with the tiles, making the tile approach easier in the long run. 

A little elbow grease never hurt anyone. Sometimes if you want better, you can't opt for easier. Right? I'll approach my maps from this angle, and rough them down to be painted atop of. If it is doable, trust I'll find a way to do it. Heh. I'm a tenacious one. 

[WereAlpaca]

8 hours ago, KonigDerZerfall said:

A little elbow grease never hurt anyone. Sometimes if you want better, you can't opt for easier. Right? I'll approach my maps from this angle, and rough them down to be painted atop of. If it is doable, trust I'll find a way to do it. Heh. I'm a tenacious one. 

Would love to see any techniques you uncover along the way! Other members might have valuable advice if you start a progressive thread on it as well  cheers

[Beefy Kasplant]

9 hours ago, KonigDerZerfall said:

A little elbow grease never hurt anyone. Sometimes if you want better, you can't opt for easier. Right? I'll approach my maps from this angle, and rough them down to be painted atop of. If it is doable, trust I'll find a way to do it. Heh. I'm a tenacious one. 

 

 

Just saying that it is possible, but harder! I would love to see you try it, and I would love it more to see you succeed at it! So go for it!

[KonigDerZerfall]

3 hours ago, Kibbelz said:

@raeven is the only user im aware of who has got results from a painted map method. I believe he does it by painting objects and drawing them ontop of a ground texture. Im not a fan of a painted style myself and i think the advantage of tiles massively outweigh painting but each to their own  check out his game here:

Goodluck!

That still looks slightly grid-based. I'm looking to conform it to the grid while giving off the illusion that there is no grid. My style is closer to something like this:

[Kibbelz]

It looks really good but so much work for one map to maintain the same quality. You'll also have to render tree tops in that scene as a fringe layer in the engine.

[Beefy Kasplant]

Im thinking without pixel based movement, or even diagonal movement this won't feel natural to walk around in to be honest

[Neeknog]

Maybe setting your tiles to smaller 16 or 8x8 will make it easier to achieve. 

[Phenomenal]

Would there not be a way with the source to say redmap the drawing for parts that you want to be solid, place that under the final paint of the map and then read the redmap for collisions ect.?

[KonigDerZerfall]

12 hours ago, PhenomenalDev said:

Would there not be a way with the source to say redmap the drawing for parts that you want to be solid, place that under the final paint of the map and then read the redmap for collisions ect.?

Should be, and because the source code will be released to fine-tune core mechanics of this engine, I'm not TOO worried about it feeling clunky. Even modifying it to add diagonal movement would clear up most of that problem. I mainly wanted to know if I could go ahead and lay down my custom graphics instead of having to use tile placeholders until source is out.

[Damian666]

I agree with niko, making tiles smaller would certainly look much smoother.

[KonigDerZerfall]

1 hour ago, Damian666 said:

I agree with niko, making tiles smaller would certainly look much smoother.

Of course. Any advice I can implement currently or start to implement a little before source release, I'm doing. 

[WereAlpaca]

12 hours ago, KonigDerZerfall said:

Of course. Any advice I can implement currently or start to implement a little before source release, I'm doing. 

You've given very logical and well aimed responses to everyone, good stuff Konig! I'm enthusiastic to see what you produce. This thread seems to have an oddly pessimistic feel, but I know this can be done well - I'd also like to share some useful thoughts! First of all, I would highly recommend putting together a base tileset to work from. When you can tile in portions of the map, you can really expand on that visual by parallaxing over it and you gain a lot of FPS. This combining of techniques is the perfect balance, especially when your work load feels so overwhelming. There are many inspiring examples online. Secondly, using a tileset as a base will solve the players feeling unnatural or misaligned, as you can tell from this thread, that will be a problem you will run into later. You can export full resolution and properly scaled images of the maps - straight from the editor - might need open source to export with specificity. Third of all, having a base tileset allows your map makers/programmers to have something to use and test with. Having a "base" mapper who goes through and only maps out using the base tileset could greatly lower the load on the artist as well! Lastly, make all of your fringe details use an efficient amount of tiles. Sometimes when you're taking the parallaxing approach, the over the character details stop needing to line up to grids - then you start having excessive fringe tiles being rendered. Put simple: make sure your fringe layers fit in a grid logically. To wrap this all up, keep your artistic integrity, and break rules when you need to! Cheers.