Increased Player/Hero frames?

WolfgangLaRocco

New member
I like working with pixel art and animation. I want to give my player character fluid animation (about an 8 frame walk cycle, for example), but the default tileset will only allow a small amount of tiles. How can I expand it? How can I use, say, the larger Monster tiles for the Player character instead of the incredibly small GameObjectTiles?
 

WolfgangLaRocco

New member
For example, it would be impossible with the current toolset to recreate something like Little Samson because there are more tiles for the player character than are available in NESMaker. Little Samson himself has 50 unique frames of animation alone, only two of which are mirrored. Unless I'm overlooking something that can swap out the default Player tileset (GameObjectTiles) with a larger one?

23846.gif
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Sadly, you can't. Monster_XXX tilesets have the same size than the GameObjectTiles one: 128 x 64 px.
And, it's not the only thing you can't do with NESmaker.
I'd suggest to try making a smaller game, with all the constraints and limitations of the current version of NESmaker.
And follow its developpement, the next versions will always push those limitaitons a little further.
 

Dirk

Member
Is there a way to have have the player tileset for animations like walking and when you jump replace the player object with a monster object, but with prayer graphics? When you land the monster object gets swapped out with the player object again.
You'd lose space for your monsters, but have more animations for your player.
 

Woogz

Member
If you haven't watched this video by Micro Mages creators Morphcat Games, check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM

At around the 4 minute mark it starts to talk about sprite optimization, and how you can fit in all your sprites in limited space. It's very useful. Games like like Little Samson didn't have each large individual sprite placed in its lets say "Game Object Tiles". There are multiple 8x8 tiles on Little Samsons character that are reused in each frame of animation. For example, parts of Little Samsons head/face can be reused in multiple frames of animation. You only need 1 8x8 tile of that part on your sheet and it will have multiple uses. If you're careful with your sprite design and make it so a good amount of your tiles can be reused, you'll free up plenty of space. especially if your character is 16x16 or 16x32. Horizontal and Vertical flipping can also come very much in handy.

The same thing you do for sprite optimization of your character can be done with monsters as well. Working around limitations can be tough, but you'll come out better for it.
 

WolfgangLaRocco

New member
@Dirk - I guess I haven't learned how to do that yet.

@Woogz - Wow! That was an extremely helpful video and I can't believe I didn't watch for redundant tiles! The current tools are still very limiting, but this helped me think differently!

Thanks, everyone!
 

Raftronaut

Member
Yes! Morphcat's technique of looking for duplicate or redundant tiles is by building a program to do so, however, given the smaller CHR size in the tilesets we have to work with in Nesmaker, i've gotten pretty good at optimizing my player tile sets just by scanning them by naked eye. You can really get creative by reusing tiles, I've found it to have inspired some of my better character animations...
 

Dirk

Member
@WolfgangLaRocco - My neither :-( but I hope I'll be able to do so one day, so I have more room for ducking, swimming. attacking, idle... animations.
 

Mugi

Member
you can fit surprisingly much into a small space with a bit of optimization and clever drawing.
for instance, here's the tileset of my game's protagonist with 20 frames of 3x3 tile sprite, it's quite enough for a relatively smoothly animated actions.

sprites_full.png

and here's the same thing crammed into a tileset.

sprites.png

that said, there's multiple more or less advanced ways to get more space for the player sprite.
for instance, as you can see, i have less than one row of tiles free on this tileset, and no alternate weapon sprites etc.
one could use object weapons, or just some single-tile alterations to the sprite to get like, a gun or something, but in my game for example, there will be atleast 3 different ones,
with relatively large changes to the attack frames, so we're just going the other way and reloading the sprites based on what weapon is in use at the time.

another way would be to use chr ram for this, you can load up to 4 sheets of sprites into the 4 ram banks, but especially with tile animations, that will get complicated really fast.
 

JMC_orbit

New member
For example, it would be impossible with the current toolset to recreate something like Little Samson because there are more tiles for the player character than are available in NESMaker. Little Samson himself has 50 unique frames of animation alone, only two of which are mirrored. Unless I'm overlooking something that can swap out the default Player tileset (GameObjectTiles) with a larger one?

23846.gif
You can mirror and flip tiles.
 
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