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View Full Version : More power to ripping/arranging graphics



Dart Zaidyer
03-14-2006, 03:22 PM
The following image is the result of 40 minutes of haggling and wrestling with ZQuest to rip, arrange and set up a cinematic screen:
http://67.15.107.11/~zcworld/filemanager/Users/DartZaidyer/metroid-vig1-x01.gif
(By the way, if you needed an example of why having it say "Zelda Time" is ludicrous, this is it.)

At first I wanted to rip it natively as 8bpp tiles... And yes, while ZQuest allows you to do that, it only uses CSet 0 to do it with, which completely defeats the purpose of such a feature. So, I cut it down to the 16-color image you see, leeched it, and proceeded with the tedium of setting up combo after combo to get the whole thing.

This needs to be easier. First of all, Leeching an image for tiles should have the option to preserve the palette structure of the targeted image, so you can safely set it up as a level palette and not have to redraw all the stuff you just ripped. Ideally it would have an "Offset palette by X CSets" control, in case the target image doesn't use all 256 colors of its palette and you want to start the tiles out on CSet 2 instead of 0.
Secondly, there needs to be some kind of keystroke in the Combo editor to crawl an entire page of tiles and set them as combos... Granted, you'd still need to fine-tune them later, but it would be much handier for anyone building a tileset or ripping a whole image for use in a cutscene.
And finally, there ought to be a way to automatically crawl a combo page and draw it to the current screen... Just for cutscenes like this one.


These features would give ZQuest a definite boost in power and make things easier for quest makers.

Petoe
03-14-2006, 03:40 PM
These features would give ZQuest a definite boost in power and make things easier for quest makers.

Indeed. Great that you suggested this!

I mean, a cutscenen screen like that metroid one there... It can take hours to make. :shakeno: And since I tend to add lots of high-quality cutscenes to my quests, too much time goes to making of them and setting them up in Zquest...

About dragging an entire tile page to the screen, couldn't there be a feature like... well eg you right click mouse and in the menu that pops up there could be option like "Grab/Import/drag/bring a Tile Page" and you just choose a tile page with that cool cutscene image and voila, that's it!
Something like that... dunno if I made any sense.