A few tips I've found.

[ShadowTiger]

I'm sure a few of you already know about these, but I thought I would share them anyway.

1) Put your room on layer 1 instead of on layer 0. Use these only in special cases, such as when you want to have a whole bunch of conveyor tiles and / or pit warps, but don't want to spare the extra combos. Layer 0 takes all the effects like the warping, and layer 1 holds all the graphics for you! :kawaii: It works really well too! So you can make a black or blank combo with the characteristic, and just slap it down, and the player won't even see it! :thumbsup:

2) Timed Pit warps: Use the above tip to combo cycle an empty combo and a pit warp. Do some experimenting with the animation unit to find out the best time for it.

3) I'm just bringing the formula back up. Thank C-Dawg for this one. The formula for the combo cycling Cells is that if you have 2 difference combos with different speeds and animations, make sure that both combos equal the same thing, for example, make sure that, say you have 2 combos. One combo should have 4 frames, the other 6. The first one should have a speed of 3, while the latter has a speed of 2. 3x4 = 12, 2x6 = 12. See?

[C-Dawg]

It turns out that #3 doesnt actually work that way, BH4. When a combo animates, there is a little extra delay added for the time it takes one combo to switch to another- setting up several cells the way you (and I) suggested will initially work, but it will quickly break down as the combos go through multiple iterations.

-C

[ShadowTiger]

Ah. Thanks for the update. I'm still a little shaky on the subject myself, so when I found the formula, (how many of you keep writing forumula? :odd: ) I rejoiced and whatever. So I'll just... edit that out, alright? Nah, makes no difference. :shrug:

So how does everyone like tip #1? It's my personal favorite. :shy:

[Ganonator]

i've been utilizing tip #1 ever since pit combos came out. In fact, practically all of the overworlds in J:R are on layer 1. cool, huh?

[System Error]

Hmm...I don't really get #1. I take the time to lay everything out right. I have TONS of combo room, it's not like I'm gonna run out. >_<

[TheGeepster]

Take the frame speeds and subtract 1 and you'll do OK with timing.

Because each frame is held for # of tics equal to the speed plus one.

So in your example, 4 frames, 2 speed would be equal to 6 frames, 1 speed.

[Teilyr]

Hm.. I don't see the usefulness on placing all screens on layer 1.

But, the obvious one for people that're just starting with layers is to place your tree layers on 4 or above. This way, flying enemies won't land ontop of the tree that Link's hiding behind.

At least I think it's 4... I've gotta start fiddling with stuff again..

[ShadowTiger]

Well.... Tip #1, which as I said, is my personal favorite, and for a reason, :rolleyes: , which is, that you can save combo space, and do neat tricks with layers. There. :D You can create a screen of allusion, where if you step on a random piece of the floor, you get warped.

Remember, the entire screen doesn't have to be on Layer 1, just the parts that will go over the special combos and stuff. I would show a picture, but... meh. Later. :shrug:

[DarkDragoonX]

Originally posted by Britannianhero4
...You can create a screen of allusion...

I'm going to assume that you mean "illusion."

[ShadowTiger]

Er.... I don't know. :sweat: I might have meant it, but..... why? :odd: What does allusion mean? And by that, I mean in context to the rest of the sentence.

[TheGeepster]

I'm not sure what "allusion" alludes to in that sentence, but Putting what you can on Layer 1 would help avoid under combo trouble. Not sure if it would help with slash combos though.

Another couple of notes:
1 second = 60 tics.
tics/frame = speed + 1.
tics/animation = frames * tics/frame.

[ShadowTiger]

Hmm.. You may be right. Then again, you could also be wrong. I don't really know for sure yet. Someone, (it'll probably end up being me. :sweat: ) should do a test quest to find out all these things.

[C-Dawg]

An allusion is an indirect literary reference to something else. For example, if I say that a BH4 by any other name would spell as sweetly, I'm making an allusion to Romeo and Juliet.

In the context of your sentence, it's nonsense.

Your layer 1 idea is only useful when you need to do things with the screen. Its better to put everything on Layer 0 and just do cover work with layer 1 as needed, because we have SEVERLY limited numbers of maps to use as layers. Only maps 0-99 can be layered- the higher maps still can't be. So if you waste all your maps by putting a layer 1 on every screen, it could come back to bite you in the ass.

-C

[ShadowTiger]

Wow. Thanks for the advice. So what if we put all of our layers on the first 99 maps, and save the rest of the maps for the actual location? I'm sure that the first 15 or so maps could be used as the characters pictures, while the rest of them would be good layer screens. Wouldn't this work? The question is, would it use up extra space because of the much larger map count, or would it just be more Zeros?

[Questwizard88]

That might work out, and it would probably use a LOT more space, due to all of the flags and stuff set for each screen on each map.

[ShadowTiger]

Well, I'm not sure. DN and FCF (one of them.) mentioned something about ... something, being a lot, but still relatively small, due to the amount of data required. For example, the idea that's currently swimming around in my head is that even if you have 255 maps selected, but they're all empty, that's a whole lot of zeros on the data sheet, with a few numbers as the map count. If the maps have absolutely nothing on them, then they won't really use a lot of space.

It works the same way (again, in my opinion/head. :rolleyes: ) with the tiles. We have some 250 tile pages, but if they're all blank, then that's a lot of Zeros. :shrug: They don't have any mass!

And considering that the above is just my logic, please feel free to correct it. And no flaming please. Thank you.

[Questwizard88]

I do know that the tiles, palettes, and combos don't use space if their not there, but i'm not too sure about maps. With the empty tileset, i guess all it really does is basically tell zc where to find the beginning and end of the tileset, which would probably only use 2 bytes for it, and be right together.

EDIT: I put my dmaps from the end of the list, to the beginning, and it inceresed the file size significantly. I guess it stores stuff like that, because i once put a tile in the last space in the set, with all other tiles before that completely blank, and I ended up with a 6.8 MB file. :surprise:

[TheGeepster]

A ZC quest is a compressed file, so a lot of zeros doesn't have too much of an effect on size. Still better to limit the # of maps to what you're using, though.