Prerendered Maps

[bustedradio]

I hope this is the correct forum for this.


I've noticed lately that I mostly created maps in photoshop and then just placed them into MV, rather than building them in MV itself.


I am using custom tiles, so I think that's mainly the reason why I've been making maps in photoshop, because I don't want to bother with making sure everything wraps correctly.


I don't mess around with lighting or atmospheric effects, so would prerendering a map cause me any problems in the future?


What are the pros and cons of creating a map beforehand vs making them in mv?

 

[Wookiee420]

I mostly use parallax maps for my exteriors, they totally make your game look more unique. Don't forget that you can do your maps in layers and with some plugin help you can add the layers as different things the actors can walk in front of or behind.....like a building they walk in front of the lower floors but on the ground behind the buildings upper floors


as i see it:


pros
they are more detailed......they avoid the "squared" look of doing everything in editor.... you can have more detail than just the few pages of tiles....uniqueness....IMO fun to put all the layers and the regions and add them into the editor and make them usable..depending how you do it you can save space....more reason to use doodads


cons


takes exponentially longer...possibility of problems making everything work right for walking and being in front/behind....sometimes it can be a pain to size it all right so it fits in the square event grids (my issue).....i know there are more but i am biased towards them, and i am still new enough that i think everything i do wrong is my fault not the engines

 

[Kes]

An additional con for using parallax maps is that they bloat the size of your file.  A map made in the editor is most unlikely to be more than 100kb.  A parallax map at the minimum would be 1Mb, and can easily go up to 4Mb or more.  Multiply that by the number of maps you do, and you can see that it could quickly become huge.  This may, or may not, be an issue, but I do know that people on metered internet connection, or satellite connection, or just simply a slow connection, find big file sizes a turn-off.

 

[Wookiee420]

@ksjp17 a parallax map file size is bigger than a tile map? good to know, i guess multiple layers of map vs tiles does add up, that makes sense...i like answering myself

 

[PsychicToaster]

Considering the size of most modern games, I wouldn't worry about it. Even people with slower connections still download Steam games that take up 8GB of space. I am one of them. I usually just let a big game download overnight.