Parallax Mapping Ideas and Tutorials

[JayRay]

Yep, this is NOT a necropost, but a few more things I wanted to add, to help get the MOST out of your mapping experience, especially for the Ace and MV users...

First. I would always suggest either Estriole's EST - Event Size and Trigger or Orange Hit Boxes for RMMV or for RMVXA, I would suggest GubiD's Large Event System or equivalent...

Okay, so, we all know about the cop out of parallaxing, but, let's look at a few other ideas that can ensure TONS of varied unique maps.

1. Events as Tiles - That's right, I went there... In RMMV, each character is also 48x48, and a group of actors in one spritesheet can be 12x8 for 96 tiles. TONS of 1-tile bits to add the accents to your game map, and you can even automatically set passability with the "through" tag, "below character" and "above character". Also, with RMMV, events can be a bit more numerous (i've had over 200 events at once in a map with no major slowdown) - Just make sure you turn off walking animation, and turn off the move route, unless you want that new 1x1 bush walking off...

2. Now, you've got TONS of doodads, but another thread from about a year ago (on Reddit) complained that he couldn't then use like 13 trees of varying types. Well... With that aforementioned large event script, you can. See that character sheet you had earlier with 48x48 tiles? Change it!. As long as you have basically the same type of item in it, you could easily add frames that are 144x288, just make sure that the character sheet is 12 frames by 8 frames, OR make sure you add $ in front of the file name and have only 3 frames by 4 frames. Then you can just adjust the hitbox size, or change some region passability settings and now, you've got TONS of unique landscapes!

3. Less Autotiling! More unique Tiles! If you're going to create a wilderness scene, and for some reason, aren't going to use A4 all that much, you can utilize each of the autotile versions and that shift-click mapping, to create multiple versions of that tile. concave tile, convex tile, the middle of a tall column of an autotile, and the middle of a wide column of an autotile, along with a FLAT SHIFT Right Click - left CLICK of a tile makes 5 1x1 unique tiles that can be added.

2. Slepinir Layering... Add those extra shadows on another layer. Want to make your maps look even more unique? Add a shadows and highlights layer to the map! with 4 or 5 of those seamless textures repeating on a map, you can have tons of maps!

4. Bind Pictures to Map. Remember games like Warlords Battlecry? They had HUGE CG maps, bigger than Baldur's Gate, bigger than most CG games. Well, they had a secret... and it's this. Those maps were actually individual images, that were just added to the map in a grid (1, 4, 3, 2, 5, and so on) so that someone could keep going and going and going. With the right script calls and such, you can bind say 64 pictures to a map, and move them around, OR you can tweak a multiple parallax script to allow you to set parallax(es) to all be below the player. just set the offsets for the parallaxes at start, or pictures to the right X and or Y coordinates.

5. Basic Parallaxes. You could make a parallax that is for ONE map, and that's it, OR you can create a parallax template! (Forest path North to South, Forest clearing, Noble District) That creates a basic version of each map you want to use. Then you can repeat each parallax for connecting maps, and use tilesets to make that map unique in and of itself. Throw in that Slepinir system, and now you've got parallax layers AND embellishments. 16 parallaxes, and 16 embellishments, you now got 256 parallaxes for your forest scenes... do the same for your Deserts and snow fields, and you've now got literally thousands of map parallaxes that could never be done before, even with PNG optimization.

6. Icons as Event Graphics. While it hasn't been implemented fully in RMMV that I know of, There are several scripts in RMVXAce that allow for icons (the little 24x24 things) to be placed in the center of a tile. Now, you might not think this is necessary, but. with a little tweaking to the size of an icon, you could effectively have an icon be any size you want! Just like oversized events, an icon could accompany multiple layers!

Hopefully this will help the parallaxers and NON-parallaxers alike realize the incredible versatile options they have available to them when making maps with VXAce and MV!