CREATE YOUR OWN RPG WITH DANTE 2!!

D.Lardenoye

CHAPTER 3 - THE DANTE 2 DEMO EDITOR

In the last chapters I discussed how to make preparations 
for creating an RPG and how a number of system options for
Dante 2 work. This time you can finally get to work.

Every good Japanese RPG has an intro and ending demo, so 
this option couldn't be left out of Dante 2. Sadly the demo
part of Dante is one of the least elaborate options, in the
sense that everything works in a kind of round about way and
the size of the demo is very limited (you can use page 1 and
2 from VRAM and you cannot load extra data during the demo).
Still some very good effects can be attained with some
creativity.

HOW DO YOU START?

Make sure you have kind of an idea, what the demo is going
to look like - don't make it too long. The main point of the
demo is to introduce the hero of the story, so the best 
approach is to have the demo gradually flow into the game
scene. One more thing: watch out using too much text! The
demo editor is very cumbersome with regards to text and
large chunks of texts will take a very considerable amount 
of work.

THE DEMO GRAPHICS

The next step is to draw the graphics for the demo. You 
create two drawings in screen 5 (two different palettes are
allowed). These drawings are placed in shadow pages and can
be copied to page 0 with sets of copy commands. This way 
you can create every possible effect: scrolls, animations,
texts, et cetera. It often just is a lot of work to do this
copy by copy. Remember to create a font if you have a lot of
text. Do you have little amounts of texts and little space
between the images, you can also place the texts in their
entirety to the shadow pages. This takes a lot less work.
You could create the demo graphics in Dante 2, but the 
graphics editor part is not great, so I recommend you to
make your drawings in for instance DD-Graph. In Dante 2 you
select CONSTRUCTION from the main menu and then Read graphic
data from the next menu. You can then choose which graphics
you want to load. Choose the Intro graphics. When Graphics 1
data and Graphics 2 data are mentioned, this refers to the 
two shadow pages on which the graphics are located. 

I'm not going to give you something of a drawing course. I
am of the opinion that drawing (and especially demo 
graphics) is a gift; you have it or you don't and sadly I
think I fall in the latter category.

Do you want to work in Dante 2 or edit something anyways,
then choose in the main menu (after possibly loading the
DD-graph drawings) Make intro data. You now get to a 
sub menu of the demo editor. From here you can edit Graphics
set 1 data, Graphics set 2 data or the actual animation 
data. If you select on of the first two options, you get to
the drawing program in Dante 2.

THE DRAWING PROGRAM

This program has fairly limited options.  The Graph/
Trigger button B makes the menu appear at all times. The 
icons are quite intuitive, but in all completeness, from 
left to right: 
 END
 UNDO
 DRAW MANUALLY
 DRAW LINE
 DRAW RECTANGLE
 DRAW FILLED IN RECTANGLE
 DRAW CIRCLE  
 COLOR IN 
 ZOOM (also change palette data )
 COPY

Mind you! Color 15 is always white and cannot be changed! If
you end the demo editor it automatically asks you if you
want to save your changes or not. Are you finished with both
your demo drawings? Then you can get to work on editing the
actual demo.

THE DEMO ANIMATION EDITOR (ANIMATION DATA)

You get here from the main demo menu. A demo in Dante 2 
consists of a long series of elementary commands you have to
select yourself. This is a kind of round about way to create
a demo but the effects you can get with this are quite good.
Loop at the sample RPG demo and learn from its examples. 

This menu has the following options:

END THIS MODE - Back to the demo menu
INITIALISE DATA - All data is reinitialized (erased)
ADD STEP POINTER -  An additional step is inserted on the 
pointer (which points to a certain command from the list) 
for the current step.
TRIM STEP POINTER - A command is removed from the pointer 
for the current step.
CREATE CURSOR STEP - Change the cursor step between steps of
1, 2, 4 or 8.
MOVE STEP POINTER - Sets the pointer to a specific step or 
to the beginning or ending of the demo data.
DISPLAY FROM POINT - Check the demo data, starting with the
current step of the pointer, step by step. Copy commands are
shown visually, so you can see if it looks good. The other
commands are not visually executed but are displayed as 
texts.

<COMMANDS>  This list of commands  make up the actual 
contents for the command list. Choose a command and then put
that command to the current step pointer, after which the
pointer is raised by one. The list can handle 2048 command;
more than plenty.

The commands are:

END - This indicates an empty step or the end of the demo.
SET - This is a copy command from Graphics set 1/Graphics 
set 2 to page 0. You can choose to copy with IMP or TIMP 
(transparent background color). 
WAIT - Wait a set amount of time (can be selected).
CLEAR - Clears page 0.
SET PLT - Sets the color palette for page 0 based on the one
for Graphics set 1 or Graphics set 2 or changes all color 
values to black or white.
FADE PLT - Similar to SET PLT, but now you get a gradual 
transition to the palette.

This seems to be little to make a complete demo with, but
if you think about it, you see that you actually don't need
anything else. Example: a scrolling screen is a copy of a 
next part of the shadow page to the same spot on page 0, an
animation is a a number of sequential images on a shadow 
page, copied onto the same or a different part of page 0 
(for instance a walking NPC). Displaying text is copying a
character from the shadow page to page 0 (which can be 
quite cumbersome with large texts as indicated earlier).

You need to take a few things into consideration: make sure
that if you work with two different palettes, you don't show
drawings from different pages on screen at the same time,
because then one of them will always have the wrong palette!
If you put an image from Graphics set 1 to page 0 after you
deleted the image from Graphics set 2 which was there before
you need to set the correct palette again.

You can get extra nice effects with the BLACK/WHITE Fade and
Set options. Set Palette White, followed by Set Palette 
Graphics set 1 or 2 (depending on which one you were using) 
shows a 'flash' and with a Fade Palette White, Clear, Set 
new image to page 0,  Fade Palette  Graphics set 1 or 2 you
can transition two images into each other nicely.

What you need to remember is to set pauses between every 
command. Set works quite fast, but if you need to insert a
command at a later time you can as well with add step 
pointer. Check when setting everything up with the Display 
from point option to see if everything is to your  liking.

As stated earlier, creating a demo with Dante 2 is a long 
and meticulous work, but it can deliver nice results. But it
all comes down to the game itself, which you need not 
forget.

THE END DEMO

This whole process is the same for the end demo editor. 
You'd better wait until your RPG is finished before you work
on this. Perhaps your story will take an unexpected turn,
which makes you have to change everything all over again.

So far so good for creating the demos in Dante 2. Next time
we'll go on with creaaaaaaaaaaaaaating the game environment.

Dennis
