Shrinking the character and increasing the size of tiles to make the world appear bigger.

[Kip]

Hey everyone. I have a question that google can't seem to help me find the answer to


You see, I'm making my vier first RPG maker game using MV and I have a mechanic where the player can cast a spell to make themselves 4 times smaller. (allows them to fit through tiny holes and what not)


But here's the thing. I don't want to shrink down my character's walking sprite. Instead I want to scale the world's tiles UP. 


Here's an example:
The bed tileset consists of 2 tiles normally. One top tile for the top of the bed, and one bottom tile for the bottom. It is 1x2 (one across, two down)


If I had my way, I would put the tilesheet into photoshop and scale it up by 400% and paste it back in. Hypothetically that would make the same bed a little pixelated of course, but also that bed would now be 4x8 (the top being 4 tiles across and the bed going 8 tiles down)


Problem is when I try this, going into the tile selection tab, most of the tiles are cut off and I can only see the first two objects on the page...does anyone have any ideas for me?

 

[Andar]

The tilesheet formats need to be kept no matter what size the tiles are. If you want to make your world four times as large, then only one fourth of your tiles will fit into a tilesheet - and you can't do that as simple with autotiles either.


Best way to achieve the desired effect is to be very carefull about tilesets, effectively only using a fourth of the tileset on most maps, and then transfer to maps that use enlarged versions of only the tiles from the reduces selection.

 

[Kip]

Do you know of any programs that could automate the process of copying all the tiles and enlarging them?


I've been doing it tile by tile, but unfortunately it's difficult to select a perfect box around the tiles. when I scale them up, I often have little fringes of other tiles on the edges or small gaps of empty space between them...


Not to mention it's rather time consuming. Haha is this the reason nobody does this? Or is there some plug in out there that would make my life easier?

 

[Kip]

The tilesheet formats need to be kept no matter what size the tiles are. If you want to make your world four times as large, then only one fourth of your tiles will fit into a tilesheet - and you can't do that as simple with autotiles either.


Best way to achieve the desired effect is to be very carefull about tilesets, effectively only using a fourth of the tileset on most maps, and then transfer to maps that use enlarged versions of only the tiles from the reduces selection.

Sooo after working on my task of enlarging all the tile sets for a few hours I finally finished! Although it would seem that it didn't have quite the desired effect...

Spoiler

As you can see, the "animations" are all messed up. I think it's because RPG maker is still using the same size tile sets inside the program despite my having resized all the pictures. 

Using this approach has had another issue as well.

Spoiler

I increased the size of all of the in the "dungeon" tileset, by 200%


This means that each tileset is now broken up into 4 separate images. (for instance the "Top left, Bottom left, Top right, and Bottom right" portions of the "dungeon_A1" tileset. 


But it doesn't appear that the Tilesets database will allow for me to have enough tabs to fit all 4 parts of every tile set in one single area map. It seems like the tabs can only go down to "E" but I would need quite a few more tabs to be able to fit all the pieces of the tilesets. 

Here are some examples of the scaled up tilesets as compared to the regular versions:

Spoiler

And then finally the original


: 

I'm grasping at straws here guys...I'm thinking there HAS to be some sort of plugin that would help RPG Maker MV understand how to deal with scaled up tilesets...right? maybe like and HD plugin that would raise the resolution of the tilesets or something?


No matter how much I search, the only things I can find are plugins and tutorials on how to take the old 32x32 tiles and change them to 48x48. But That doesn't help in my particular situation...

 

[Andar]

I'm grasping at straws here guys...I'm thinking there HAS to be some sort of plugin that would help RPG Maker MV understand how to deal with scaled up tilesets...right?

Then you're thinking wrong. Such a way does not exist and cannot exist, because 2D works differently than 3D pictures.


What you're experimenting is exactly the problem I mentioned above: you CANNOT scale autotiles, they need to remain in their original scale.


Anything on the A#-Tilesheets has to remain in exactly the format/size it is originally, you can only make completely new autotiles that will look as if they're scaled when in use but in reality are not scaled but entirely new tiles or the original size.

 

[Kip]

hmmm...well that's inconvenient, isn't it? haha So I'll just have to piece together custom tilesets that include only the still frame tiles I want.


Haha looking back at your original answer, I understand what you were saying now. Forgive me, I've only started using RPG maker yesterday, so most of the terminology goes over my head still. It makes sense to call animated tiles "autotiles" XD


Thank you for your time. If you ever happen to come across a plugin that allows for more tilesets to be included in one map I would love to hear about it!

 

[Andar]

Not exactly - there are animated autotiles in A1, but what autotiles refers to is how they fill up a larger part of the map even with static images - the borders that change depending on where you place additional tiles.