Zelda: ALTTP type worlds...

[MiToVo]

Hello, everyone...

So this is my second official post here, but my first where I'm asking a question. To spare y'all a ton of reading, I'll cut right to the question...

Basically, I'm working on the early, pre-production parts of of a game project. The game will be top-down, 8-direction type movement, through a series of areas, above ground and in dungeons, etc.

I'm planning ot set it up like Zelda: A Link To The Past, where it's broken down into larger "chunks" that scroll for a bit before swapping over to the next area (rather than the original Zelda's single rooms). Additionally, I don't intend to do this with tile-based graphics, but rather with pre-drawn backgrounds, on top of which the player, enemies and various props and such will be placed. I'm trying to go for a more hand-drawn, stylized approach to the graphics, and I feel this is the best way to achieve that.

I've looked for some examples, or tutorials explaining how to set something like that up, but have been unsuccessful.

So, I'm wondering:
1. Is it possible to have a single background image, perhaps with polygonal "collision zones" setup to control where the player can or can't go?
2. Since GE can support multiple levels on a single map, would it be feasible to layout the entire world map in one large "chunk", with dungeons and such located in separate areas of the design area? Or is it recommended that, at some point, you break things up into individual files?

I hope I did a good job of explaining what I want to do here, and appreciate any help/info.

Thanks!

[knucklecrunchgames]

Hello and welcome to the forums (Yay! A new member)

So to answer your questions

1. Is it possible to have a single background image, perhaps with polygonal "collision zones" setup to control where the player can or can't go?

I'm not sure. Maybe someone else can answer that.

2. Since GE can support multiple levels on a single map, would it be feasible to layout the entire world map in one large "chunk", with dungeons and such located in separate areas of the design area? Or is it recommended that, at some point, you break things up into individual files?

Well the more you put into a GE project, the more laggy it gets and it starts the break. So I suggest make a fair amount in one file and another in the second file and so on.

I hope this helped but maybe someone else more experienced than me can help you.

[MiToVo]

Hey there, and thank you for the response and the welcome!

Yeah, I'm trying to find something to do with boundaries and such. I know they're in there (the wireframes, if I'm not mistaken?), but I don't see anywhere that indicates them being anything but rectangles. Then again, though, I'm new, and could well just be overlooking it.

As for the trouble of the game getting too large if too many images are pre-loaded, yeah, that's a concern I could see with everything loaded. I was thinking I could maybe get away with some kind of streaming pre-load system.. maybe like what they do in the Metroid games, only perhaps it could be set up to start pre-loading before you reach the border, so there's not that wait you have like in Metroid (although I think that was more prominent in Metroid Prime.

Although, a setup like that might be a better case for tile-based graphics, since tiles are a lot smaller in size, and many would likely already be loaded into memory...

Hmm.. considerations :p.

[MrJolteon]

This demo should at least partially answer your question.

[MiToVo]

This demo should at least partially answer your question.

Hmm yeah, that certainly proves it's possible heheh.

[gamemakerdude]

This is most definitely possible. The main issue is how you want to go about doing it. The idea is to only draw the actors that are relative to what is happening in the game at that moment, or keeping the actors that are drawn to a minimum. As well as to link these areas together in such a way that when the player reaches the border of the area, the new area is loaded.

For a large world, you might want to consider using clones as game tiles as it is fairly easy to control the size. For example, my map editor (when it is complete) will reach maps to the size of 500x500 tiles easily. In this case, you would only want to create about 100-200 clones at a time to render the tiles. When the player gets further away from the tiles that are currently being rendered, you would want to destroy them and as the player approached areas that are not currently rendered you need to have a way of rendering them based on some sort of information that has been stored prior to this. The way you story that information can vary greatly depending on how large you want your maps and what makes sense to you.

For your project, I wouldn't say that this would be the only way to go about this though. If you want the rooms to actually scroll as they do in Zelda, it makes it a bit trickier. In my opinion it would be easiest to destroy one room and create another upon the prior's destruction if that makes sense to you. There are many ways to go about it, but in order to really figure it out, you're going to have to stick with it. Though I suppose if you want to use one actor as a map, as long as the image/ file isnt too large, you can probably do that. Then you could set up filled region actors to generate at the edge of the image and when the player collided with them, you could destroy the current map and load the new one, depending on which border was collided with (north, south, east, west) of course you also have to destroy/ create any enemies, items the player might collect etc., If you need more detail, PM with your project details and I'll try to help any way I can.

[gamemakerdude]

Oh, and as for your question about...

MiToVo wrote:1. Is it possible to have a single background image, perhaps with polygonal "collision zones" setup to control where the player can or can't go?

You can set up a normal actor with any animation you like to collide with any other animation you like, so you can make these collision zones by just creating an animation of the size and shape you want them to be in a program like GIMP or Photoshop, then add this animation to an actor, call it "collider" or something like that, and add a collision event to your player to react when any side of the collider actor is touching the player and to repeat while actor is colliding. Then select event actor only, use calculated mass, and set the values in the top two boxes (event/ collide multiplier) to 1 and the bottom two(event actor/ collide actor) to 0 andit should collide perfectly with whatever shape the "collider" actor's animation is set to.

[Zivouhr]

You could use wall regions to create invisible walls that wouldn't take up much memory, but would be in square rectangular shapes, which mostly works well with Zelda's block styling.

A large background object to fill in the whole world's boundaries for link would be a gigantic sprite if I'm not mistaken and would likely be easier to try the above. Best success with the project and post your results. Thanks.