Simplified Combo Setup for Carving/Iso

[C-Dawg]

I've been tinkering with the Dungeon Carving and Isometric modes, and I think they're amazing. The problem is that they require massive setup time; once I got the hang of it, it still took me fifteen minutes to set up a single Isometric drawing set. Dungeon Carving I'm still not sure about.

If you're planning on re-using the same walls or paths throughout your quest, this is no big deal. A one-time investment of time saves oodles later - the saving of time when designing in isometric mode in particular is mind-blowing.

The problem comes in when you want to use many different wall or path or river styles. Or if you're using isometric mode for several things- I was using it to set up my forests. As the number of isometric tiles scales up, your time savings goes down.

I'm wondering if it's possible to simplify the setup of isometric and carving modes somewhat. This should, in theory, be possible, since we all go through the same routine motions to set up the tiles. For path tiles, for instance, we need only draw one-forth of a tile in three states: (Ill use water as an example) One all water, one a water corner, and one with water on three sides. For simple isometric tiles, I think this is all that you need; the rest of the tiles are just permutations of this one-forth of a tile.

Walls work sort of the same way. If Zelda Classic has a three example tiles: the top of the wall, the bottom of the wall, and the floor pattern, it should be able to spit out the complete carving set. All you'd be doing is rotating the tiles and overlapping them at a diagonal, usually.

Obviously you'd have to touch up the tiles later for some more complicated things. But so much of the setup for these modes is so predictable that I'd like to see it mechanized in some way.

Awesome job on the new beta, by the way. Astounding, even.

-C

[cbailey78]

No reply?

[Jigglysaint]

I think it's a great idea, although I don't know if Zquest is able to synthisyze the tiles just based on the few tiles at hand. Also, for some tiles, flipping would not make them look right. For dungeon carving though, I don't see why this shouldn't work. You have the 2 wall tiles, 2 corner tiles(these kind of walls are easily flippable), and floor pattern.

What else would be good is if you can just pick the start tile from the combo sheet and the rest follow(except I can't remember if that's how you do it or not).

[jman2050]

the thing is, you still need combo definitions for the screen. ZC doesn't have any provision for drawing anything but combos, so the only way dungeon and isometric modes work is if there are enough defined combos in the proper order to do so. Or, another method would require more set up time.

What I might do is write in a provision so that you can draw a screen with all the neccesary combos, select a location in the combo page, and it'll set up all the correct combos in the right place based on the screen. If there's enough clamoring for it that is.

[ShadowTiger]

There just might be. :p

Okay, jman, how about this. The ZQuest user him/herself can create a 4x3 group of tiles which will have all the tiles necessary to produce the proper setup.

From the Combo Pages, you'd right click where you'd want to set up the Relational/Dungeon Carving series, select Relational Or Dungeon Carving, then select the upper left hand corner of that group of tiles in the tiles menu, and it'd build the necessary combos from that. (The user can then delete that group of tiles.)

[jman2050]

You would also need a location to store the 16x16 tiles on the tile page, but besides that it just might work.

I'll talk to DN about it.