Xlithan

Search for: ' render player shadow There's one for players and one for NPCs

You'll probably find that large 3D games don't always use large maps, they're just seamless.

To be honest, you don't really benefit much from having large maps, besides being able to talk to other players on the same map, but who wants to talk to other players when you're grinding? Not me!

Update: Making good progress with 48x48 conversion. I have sprites and tiles converted which was the easiest. Directional blocking now works correctly with the conversion. Targetting works as it should but I need to move the target image down a bit. Autotiles seem to be the trickiest to do so far. Not sure why as I've changed the values to what they should be. 16 = 24 32 = 48 48 = 72 64 = 96 80 = 120 Those should be the right values but I'm still not getting autotiles displaying correctly. Another thing I need to correct is the point of where the map starts scrolling when the player is moving. I doubt this should be much trouble so I think I'll get that fixed and leave autotiles for last. I imagine there will be other things I need to fix such as ranged weapons and spells but they might be ok, not tested yet. But so far the map editor seems to be functioning as it should with everything else :) Just an example of 48x48 tiles. I'm not super happy with the RMMV tileset so I may look for others: 

Forgot to mention downside of this is you can only have 1 map to each side of a map. You'd have to use warp attributes for say, Map 3 to Map 2 and Map 4. But your world map will be consistent with this method.

I'm now currently in the process of converting the engine to 48x48 pixels. I know this is going to be a hard process but I'm determined to have it. The graphics are just so much better and it will set it apart from other Eclipse games and allow me to take full advantage of the RMMV graphics, which are beautiful.

I was a Super Moderator at BaronSoft back when it was on the QBite forums. I played the original EO and EO2 (Which I have the source code for). I believe there is somebody else attempting to recreate Era Online and the world of Menath, but from what I saw from it, it was still using crappy graphics, crappy programming and it just wasn't appealing at all. As an old Era player from many many years ago, I believe Era deserves some justice, and I also believe it's fans deserve to see a modern, decent game. I don't really require any old graphics or anything, but I could benefit from some old world maps, storyline, lore, anything of that nature that I can incorporate into this new game.

Anything cyan will be transparent through the whole form. So if you have a cyan PictureBox, you'll actually see straight through to the desktop, rather than the forms background image. I have some LaVolpe source code but it's for PNGs in ImageBoxes, which is fine because it works. And I only need 4 ImageBoxes for clothes, beards and hairs and accessories. I would have preferred to draw them, but it's only for character creation so it's not a huge issue. I could easily just have a black picture box, and draw them onto it, but I'm stubborn and I want my character creation interface to look good, without black squares and shit. 

I managed to get one of LaVolpes snippets to work, and that was PNG to ImageBox. This is great, but I would much rather have the images drawn to a PictureBox, which I can do using existing code in the engine, but as I said above, I get that black box, which I don't want, and I don't believe it's as simple as changing an alpha value.

Update: I managed to find some source that allows me to load a PNG into an ImageBox. This will suffice for now. I would have preferred to draw the image to a picture box that already has a loaded background image but the way the current graphics rendering script works I'm not sure if that will be possible. I may have a play around with it though as it doesn't seem right that I can only get a black background when drawing to picSprite. I've been playing around with this line which is responsible for that black background. I can change the colours, but alpha blending doesn't seem to be possible with it. Direct3D_Device.Clear 0, ByVal 0, D3DCLEAR_TARGET, D3DColorRGBA(0, 255, 0, 0.5), 1#, 0

Well it seems I couldn't get this to work the way I wanted to yet. I want it to draw a paperdoll onto picSprite on frmMenu, but in order to draw things, it first draws a black box, and I don't want it to do that as picSprite has a background image already. This is so incredibly frustrating.

This is how old mapping used to be done to make it look seamless. Make the map size fairly large and then put the warp attributes about 5 squares in. It's not really worth it. I believe Konfuze or Elysium used to have genuine seamless mapping but it was incredibly laggy. As for the OP's question. No it's not really bad practice to have different map sizes. And you CAN make the world consistent by doing something like this:

And you think $80 will cover this? You're out of your mind.

Character Creation menu 

That image there, is using a gif, and I'm using some code to make the form transparent. I will be updating it though so it uses the directx coding to draw a PNG image. You get rubbish quality on the edge of an image when it's saved to GIF

Set Border Style to "None"

I decided the interface was a bit too dark for the theme I'm going for, so I have decided to use a different interface. This is what I have of the main menu so far. I had to use a GIF in order to get the transparency to work, so I've lost quality on the edges. I'm currently working on having a PNG image draw onto the form using the DX coding that's already within the script. But for now this is how it looks. I've yet to do the menu buttons but you get the idea. 

Tried that, but it's not that simple. When it comes to auto-tiles it uses a series of different numbers to find parts of that tile. When you add 48x48 tiles you're adding 16 pixels to each tile. With that said, when it comes to the code looking at say, 16 pixels, you know that's half of 32, therefore you would change it to 24, as that is half of 48. I did manage to get 48x48 working. I could place tiles, and the movement was fine. But then you have to look at things like directional blocks, cursor movement, targetting, attributes etc. etc. There's a lot more values to change to get it working than just 32, and that's why I've decided not to bother. The RMMV tiles are essentially just large, and updated versions of RMVX. I've reduced the size in photoshop and so far they still seem to hold a decent quality. However, I would have preferred 48x48 since I haven't seen any Eclipse games with those tiles yet. RMMV is a great choice of graphics to use because it has all the paperdoll graphics there for you. So anybody wanting character customisation with hairs, clothes etc. this is a great collection to use. Obviously, unless you're converting to 48x48, you'll have to go through each and every graphic and reduce the size.

I've tried working with LaVolpe's stuff but it doesn't work. When I ported it over to my project, the image didn't display. I'm going to try something else. I have some code that makes everything on the form transparent if the object is coloured vbCyan. So what I'm going to do is use a picture box and draw the image in using the current code in the project. The picture box will be coloured vbCyan so hopefully that should get the transparency and the PNG will be drawn with DirectX rather than just loaded. I'll let you guys know how it goes and if it works I'll share the method with people, if they want it.

Good evening everybody. I've been researching for hours upon hours on how to place a PNG image onto frmMenu. I've got as far as getting the form to be transparent, but I can't seem to load the PNG using any of the methods I've found online. The closest I got was inserting the PNG into a picture box, but obviously there was no transparency. Is there a way to draw the PNG using the existing code from the engine? Using SkyWyre v10.

That is, slightly annoying

 **Welcome to Era Online** Era Online is a multi-player online RPG with quests and progressing story-line. It derives from the classic Era Online games originally created by Erling Ellingsen, which was developed using the BaronSoft ORE engine. Now, Era Online has come to Eclipse, and we are recreating the world of Menath. This thread will be a project blog of all the progress I make with the game. So far, I have been constructing the interface.    I've done a few back end things, updated the map editor a little to suit my needs. My current project is converting support for 48x48 tiles.

That works too :) That would work good for if you had an option to select different screen sizes.

Hi guys! So I really want to work with RMMV graphics. This means I need to increase my tile size to 48x48. It's clearly not just a case of updating the following code: ' Tile size constants Public Const PIC_X As Long = 48 Public Const PIC_Y As Long = 48 While this does update the tile size on the screen, it doesn't update the size for the map editor, or the mouse position when hovering over characters. It also causes the sprite to be offset from the centre of the screen when map scrolling. Please don't tell me it's a case of going through the entire code changing 32's to 48's etc. lol

Public Sub DrawGUI() ' render shadow 'EngineRenderRectangle Tex_GUI(27), 0, 0, 0, 0, 800, 64, 1, 64, 800, 64 'EngineRenderRectangle Tex_GUI(26), 0, 600 - 64, 0, 0, 800, 64, 1, 64, 800, 64 RenderTexture Tex_GUI(23), 0, 0, 0, 0, 1024, 64, 1, 64 RenderTexture Tex_GUI(22), 0, 768 - 64, 0, 0, 1024, 64, 1, 64 Where I have 1024, that was 800. My screen is 1024x768