CREATE YOUR OWN RPG WITH DANTE 2!!

D.Lardenoye

CHAPTER 5 - MAKE MAP DATA -
           STATIC PART

I will first summarize how far you should be at this stage
of your RPG. To begin with you have thought up a reasonably 
detailed plot for your RPG, made an intro demo, drawn the 
graphical border of your screen and roughly picked the 
palette values. Furthermore, you should have made the font,
the animations for your player and some other standard 
animations (see part 4), as well as the player level 
parameters. Finally, if everything went right, you've made
reasonably detailed maps of each area in the game. And these
maps we are going to continue to work on. The intent of this
part is to add the maps to Dante 2. The make map data option
is available for this from the main menu in the construction
menu from Dante 2. This is the most important editor, 
because you will be creating most of your game in there.

THE MAPS

In the beginning of the course I've said a few things about 
the maps in Dante 2. The maps are the elements of your RPG -
each map represents a specific location, you can customize
the palette, a BGM, certain background animations etc. for 
each map. So make sure you have your properly laid out. We
are just going to talk about the static parts of the map, 
i.e. the objects on the map that basically belong in the 
background and are not or hardly are animated. What exactly
does the static part of your map consist of:
- parts of the background (trees, grass, rocks, etc.)
- game characters who have little or no animations
(so no monsters!).
- parts of the background that will animate only once in 
specific situations (for example, chest that open only once 
when you walk into them.)

THE MAP EDITOR

This time you need three options from the make map data  
sub menu, which you will use in the corresponding order. 
We'll start off with:

MAP CHAR GRAPHICS

This takes you to a type of editor, which resembles the one
we handled last time with almost the only difference being
that you now can set the palette values yourself. The
controls and options work exactly the same.

With this editor you will need to edit the basic components,
the building blocks for your map. On the most elementary 
level you work with blocks of 8x8. I will call such a block
a 'character'. Your cursor is 16x16 in this editor by the 
way, but that doesn't matter. To the right you see the 
overview of all the characters. All the way in the bottom
right bottom corner you see the numbers of the 4 characters
the cursor is pointing to in the part on the right. So
every character has a number and you are well advised to 
write down all the numbers with their corresponding meaning, 
i.e. 1 = tree up left, 2 = grass, etc.

Again:  think of your palette values and leave the "fixed"
values relatively unchanged.

What remains now are the two long rows to the right. These 
serve the purpose to give shape to a certain aspect of your
RPG which you probably haven't thought about yet: 3D! In 
'professional' RPGs like Ys and Xak you are able to really
walk 'behind' rocks and trees with your character, creating 
an element of depth. This option is also not missing in 
Dante 2. The top 2 rows are ment to put in characters, just
as with the bunch above it, just this time these are very
special characters. If you put these on the map and a game
character walks across them, then he will disappear "behind"
it. You can still see the character through the parts where
you used the color 0. Now this causes a problem. You can
only put one character on a spot on the screen. When you put
a tree with its depth element with color 0 as a background,
your player will walk behind it neatly like he should but
what shines through that color 0? It would have been the 
nicest if you could see the game background through color 0
(i.e. green of the forest floor). But there is no regular 
way to put two characters over one another, so you would
always get an ugly black block behind the tree. This problem
is solved by introducing 2 additional rows of characters 
(the two rows below that). The characters from these rows
make up a whole with the corresponding characters from the 
row above it. You get 2 layers when you place a 'depth' 
character to the map: first the top rows, behind which you 
can see through color 0 the second two rows. If the player
arrives on such a tile, he walks between these two layers
as it were, what causes the most realistic effect.   

This concludes the meaning of the screen layout. There are a
number of useful menu option you can activate with the MENU
icon: 
Inspect superimposed chars: This option allows you to see 
the rows of 'depth' characters over one another - the way
you will see them in the actual game. 
Copy 1  char unit:  Copies a character to another spot on 
the character overview to the right. This is because you 
normally copy 4 characters at a time with the 16x16 cursor. 
Help messages:  A short description of the explanation 
above. 

That concludes the Map Char Graphics.

MAP CHAR PARAMETERS

This is a very simple editor. After selecting this option
you get to see an overview of all characters you made with 
the first editor. You can now select characters, which will
get blocked for the player later on, so the player can't get
on these or through these. This is a second way to add 
'depth' to your RPG.

MAP CHAR ARRANGEMENT DATA

This editor allows you to finally start laying out your map 
based on the defined characters, which will prove to quite 
a lot of work because a map is larger that you would think.
Double clicking trigger B gives you a list of characters 
from which you can select one. The menu options are:

Change cursor size: change the size of the cursor
Switch location: switches between the Boss map and the 
Regular map. I will get back to this later on. Leave it set 
to the Regular map for now. 
Fill map screen: fills the screen with the current character.
Fill whole map: fills the entire map with the current 
character.
Check obstacles: check the map with special marks for the 
obstacles 
Show map layout: Gives a total view of the map.

The arrow symbols at the edges of the screen allow you to 
scroll through the map.

It would be wise to check a few relevant coordinates. You 
could check which coordinates your character needs to start
at and set these values in the Initial game start data part 
from last time.

The meaning of the coordinates:
- Map  X,Y: The coordinates of the top left of the currently
visible screen within the total map.
- Map cursor: The absolute position of the cursor on the 
map.
- Player  cursor: The relative position of the player within
the current screen. These coordinates are used elsewhere in
the editor and not the absolute cursor coordinates!

(NOTE: in this editor you don't see the lower layer 
characters when you place 'depth' characters on the map. So 
you see a black block in the background. Don't fret, this is
as it should be. In the final game everything appears like
it should).

This concludes this part. You probably have a lot of work 
cut out for you with these maps, seeing they make up the 
majority of your RPG. Next time I will continue with the 
maps but then I will talk about the dynamic part: monsters,
NPCs, animations, etc. CU!

Dennis