Some (New?) Ideas Regarding Tilesets and Character Appearance

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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I’m not sure if this belongs here, but I’ve made a post asking for help in making or editing tilesets. In the process I’ve came up with several new ideas. I’ll post a link to it for now but it’s a little repetitive and lengthy and I have no idea what I’m talking about (for the amount of ideas that I’m actually suggesting). Also most of the ideas and suggestions are towards the end of my thread.

(My original post) http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=10694.msg239715#msg239715

If I need to I can summarize the ideas here instead as well. They would probably come across a little clearer.

A lot of my ideas appear to be supported or doable in Robik’s tileset editor. I believe they all have to do with visuals rather than gameplay as well. My biggest idea would be a system where the character changes pose based on what they are wearing or wielding. So if the character is wielding nothing, they stand in a neutral pose, if they know martial arts and it is activated, they stand in a fighting stance while wielding nothing, if they are wielding a gun they stand in an action pose while holding a gun… and so on. Expanding upon this idea would be changes based off of skill level, traits or profession. If a character has a military or police profession, or if their skill level in marksmanship is high enough, they hold their firearms more professionally. If the character has the albino trait they are very pale, etc.

I’m not sure if high definition tiles are a thing, but if they aren’t a system where tile images of greater resolution are scaled down to a proportional but smaller tile size would be helpful in attempting to give faces details in order to help distinguish between faces should unique and different player tiles be possible or implemented.

Please note that I’ve only played this game for weeks at most and I’m an inexperienced in modding or coding and I don’t know how practical these ideas are, as none of them impact gameplay. Despite this, I would be willing to work on this in my own mod if I can find out what in the world I’m doing and any help would be appreciated.

If there is someone I should be contacting, or somewhere else I should post this please don’t hesitate to inform me of this. I’ve just been posting randomly about these forums in weird frenzy of misplaced excitement (Even more horrifying are these notes in parenthesis which are starting to get out of control).

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Welcome to the forums :slight_smile:
This is a reasonable place to put your thoughts and ask for feedback, no worries there.
So first the good news, what you’re suggesting is really cool and we could support it in the game with just a little work.
The bad news is in order to do what you’re suggesting your tileset would be absolutely gigantic.
A quick check indicates that the Chestole tileset has 910 overlay tiles, i.e. tiles intended to be tendered on top of the player. (4609 total BTW)
Each stance you add will act as a multiplier to the number of overlay tiles you’d need to make, for example if you supported 5 stances, you’d roughly double the number of tiles you’d need to make, and it sounds like you’d want even more than that.

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That’s the problem, yeah. It could be incredibly awesome, but too much work. I have worked for months in my tileset and haven’t gotten half of the tiles needed, that is just overwhelming. It would be really awesome, but overwhelming!

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Thank you for the welcome, I think I kinda just barged in suddenly and got fairly worked up. Well at least now I know this is possible. I was floating my ideas as fast I could think of them to see how far I could theoretically go. More realistically I plan to start out with something similar to what the ChestHole tileset does, so a character is always in an action pose, and the weapons appear in their hands. Once I figure out how the numbers work, I can try to put something small together to see how it works and if my idea can actually be achieved without investing copious amounts of work into very little. I think my initial wave of excitement has died down some so I can think a bit more clearly about the whole thing. As soon as I put down my HD tile idea, I began to realized how much work that would actually entail especially if it means that every tile would have to be made HD, not just a few (So I’m probably gonna scrap that idea). I actually think the reason I decided to start this whole thing is I realized how simple the sprites were (compared to other things of course, there are some amazing looking tilesets out there regardless) and thought that perhaps working on something of my own would be doable.

And hopefully I’ll mostly just have to concern myself with overlays as I’ll be editing an existing tileset (credit given to that tileset maker, whoever they may be). Considering updates and progress that will undoubtedly be made to CDDA while I would be working on this, support for a default stance that occurs when the player wields a weapon that doesn’t have an overlay would be nice. Maybe this is already supported I don’t know. I’m thinking this would be extra work, but it might be helpful so I can more easily see what items I haven’t gotten to, and could be as simple as the player wielding a question mark or something (or more probably, a question mark appears over the character in their default stance).

Edit: I think I forgot to explain my shadow arms idea here. This is an idea I recently came up with and decided to run with before I could find out if it’s possible. And I would probably end up giving multiple items the same overlay to save time. After messing with the tileset editor, it would appear that there are shadow tiles that are used by many items so the implementation of stances would be a certain number of shadow tiles made specifically for the player, with arms in different poses attached. It might get tricky making sure the arms attached to the torso in a visually pleasing way though, so this idea might not be very practical (I assume that the shadow tiles are called background tiles, and they therefore are in the background, so the arms would be overlapped by the player and weapon overlays making it potentially very difficult to line everything up). Anyways then I would just take the arms and put a basic recoloring on them for as many clothing and armor types as I can. Then I would position the weapons, (which for now will probably be existing and perhaps rescaled overlays moved around a bit so that they match up with the hands, or they’ll have hands attached, I’m not sure) in a certain way depending on what they are, small melee weapons one way, pistols another, etc…

I actually don’t think I suggested this yet on my official thread, but another idea I’ve been thinking about while planning this out is to change the player’s stance when they are standing still, walking, or running (pressing/holding down the move keys for a certain amount of times without interruption). Once again these are some of my lesser ideas, but I figure I’ll suggest them while I’m thinking about it.

Now if anyone is considering listening to my eccentricities and giving some support for implementation of the code (or could this be a mod? I’m still not sure what constitutes a mod vs tileset. Maybe a tileset is a mod? I’ll avoid calling this a mod for now), just let me know what I would have to provide in order to make that happen. It would give me an idea of the amount of work I would actually have to put in to this, and give me an idea of where to start.

I think I’m starting to mix my two threads together. Should I just keep the suggestions here and the questions about my project in the “The Toolbox” section?