Large/long sprites: follower distance too close

[Featherbrain]

I'm making a project with non-human dinosaur characters and to achieve realistic proportions I would like to use longer and/or larger sprites (e.g. 96 x 48 or 96 x 96) for many of the characters, including the main party. However, the immediate problem I'm running into with larger characters is that the followers remain tied to the 48x48 grid, so they appear to follow VERY closely, basically with their butts in each other's faces. Awwwkward...

Has anyone else used longer/larger sprites with visible followers? How did you overcome this and other general issues with collision, overlapping, etc? Is there a plug-in or a simple hack (I don't know Java) that can change the follower distance? Something like adding an extra grid tile of spacing between them, perhaps?

 

[ShadowDragon]

keep in mind its javascript and not java, this is totally different.

you can use taller and bigger sprites. for example:

default is 48x48, but you can use 50 x 90 as long the grid is the same.

for 3 x 4 its 150 x 360 if single slot using $ infront.
for a character sheet x 8, its 600 x 720.

follow the rules and you will be fine

 

[gstv87]

you can use larger sprites, but the movement rules are tied to the map grid, and that's fixed.
you can try a pixel movement plugin, but down at it's core it will still rely on the map grid.

your best shot is to make the sprites as large as possible, to measurements that are multiples of the grid.
I'm using large sprites for battlers, but their feet are always within the map square (tactical battle system)..... the only part that overlays on top of other sprites is their weapons.

 

[Featherbrain]

Thank you both for your responses. Just to clarify using a picture I should have included in the OP, see attached. (Sorry for the blurry art, it's just an upsized sprite for the example.) The red dino sprite is 96x96 and as you can see they stand so close they overlap, compared to the 48x48 green dinos. I'm looking for a way to increase the distance between the followers so I can use >48px sprites for the main characters without creating this prehistoric human/dino centipede situation.


RE: pixel movement, is there a "best" pixel movement plugin for my requirements? I did play around a bit with the Altimit pixel movement plugin, the only plugin I've found that features a "follower distance" parameter so far. Unfortunately, not only is pixel movement a bit of a complication I wasn't necessarily looking for, I wasn't particularly thrilled with the follower logic in the script anyway, as they get stuck very easily on things due to moving directly toward the player's latest location (even if there's now an object in the way) rather than copying the player's previous path. Overall, it is very close to what I'm looking for, so I might compromise and use this.

However, I do suspect there must be somewhere that an extra grid space or something could be added in the part of the code where the followers' movement is handled. Somewhere it must calculate that the player has moved, and could be told to just wait one extra tile of distance before following. Alternatively, though this seems less elegant, some way of creating "invisible followers" between the party members on the map. Idk... Just thinking out loud here.

 

[gstv87]

you can make a work around that, by using events following the player as if they were followers, but they'd be actually virtual *events* with a move route.
since the logic for the move route allows for random movement and distance checks, that'd cause the followers to remain at a certain radius rather than on a line.

but, depending on the actual usefulness of that solution, it might prove to be overkill.

try adding actual events to the map, put that dino sprite on them, and make them follow the player.
play around with the move route and it's parameters.
once you have it, turning that into a dynamic event shouldn't be hard.

if you want to polish it correctly, that same logic could be ported over to the followers system.... but that's a lot more work.
still a lot less work than making a pixel movement plugin from scratch tho.