22 replies to this topic

[FireSeraphim]

Welcome to the official thread for my WIP Phoenix Tileset! As a few of you may be already aware, I've been working on this tileset for roughly a week now (And this is impressive since I have gotten ALOT done in that small time frame, although it may still need testing). And now for some Q&As and some exposition for those reading this thread so people will know what to expect.

 

Q: What is your goals with this tileset?

A: Simply put, I am hoping to make my own take on a "ALTTP Plus" styled tileset that's actually fairly faithful to (some of) the stylistic sensibilities of ALTTP while adding some polish here and there.

 

Q: Anything peculiar we should know about this tileset

A: Yep, I feel that I need to inform you that for the overworld I'm using tiles that have been condensed or scaled down to account for the actual size scale of a 16x16 pixel sized Link, but the dungeon and interior tiles will retain their full scale from ALTTP and before you claim this is inconsistant I will point out there is actual prior precedent in the LOZ series for this in good ol' Zelda 1 on the NES and I think it works here as well. 'Fore you all start worrying this tileset will not be another Pure.

 

Q: Do you have a release plan of sorts?

A: Infact I do, This tileset will be released in three phases

• Phase 1 - "Light World"   which will include alot of basic overworld tiles, interior tiles, cave tiles (and palette), most of the usable dungeon tiles, unique light world tiles that have never been ripped before, the palettes for the Light world (Overworld), Hyrule Castle, Hyrule Castle's Basement (it's palette is actually shared with the Dark World's very own Swamp Palace), The unique and never before ripped palette for the Sanctuary (Yep, the Sanctuary actually has it's own palette), The Eastern Palace, The Desert Palace, The Ice Cave (It's palette is shared with the Dark World's Ice Palace) and the Tower of Hera
• Phase 2 - "Dark World"   which will include dark world tiles, including those that have never been in any other set before, The palletes for the Dark Palace, Skull Woods, Thieves Town/Gargoyles Domain, Ganon's Tower and the Pyramid of Power (The Pyramid has it's own palette as well)
• Phase 3 - "Realm of the Heavens"   which will include what unique little bits was recently ripped from Four Sword Adventures (and any potential future ripped assets that might be made in the interim) as well as bits and pieces of my unique reworking of some of the tiles from Crusader of Centy (obviously only the stuff that wouldn't have too much trouble fitting into ALTTP) and other tiles that fit into Phoenix's artstyle

Q: Can we see some screenshots?

A: Sure.

Edited by FireSeraphim, 23 September 2016 - 11:26 PM.

[Timelord]

This is interesting. If you're considering requests, one of the main things mising from tilesets that makes them lack the Z3 aesthetics, is Z3-style mountains. (I see you are using BS style mountains here, too.) They also lack tiles for the Z3 enemies, and bosses.

Compare the mountain wall face, if you want to note the difference. The scale of houses is also different to Pure, which uses GB style houses, as are many object tiles... I've been wishing for a complete Z3 tileset for years, but it always seems as if I'll have to make me own.


All that aside, you may want to add a fourth phase for PW tiles (snow overworld, trees) and extra enemy tiles. I have no idea how close to actual Z3 tiles your end result will be. I would test, and use something meant to allow cloning Z3 screens happily.

[FireSeraphim]

@ZoriaRPG: The mountains are actually Sludge's mini-ALTTP Mountains, not a single BS Zelda mountain tile in sight. Also what would I name such a fourth phase? There isn't really a complete Parallel Worlds rip and some of the stuff in Parallel Worlds I'm still on the fence about.

[Timelord]

@ZoriaRPG: The mountains are actually Sludge's mini-ALTTP Mountains, not a single BS Zelda mountain tile in sight. Also what would I name such a fourth phase? There isn't really a complete Parallel Worlds rip and some of the stuff in Parallel Worlds I'm still on the fence about.

Well, as I hinted at, I'd love a complete Z3 rip, without squishing, but I don't really expect anyone will do it. PW stuff would be the Parallel Tower, dungeon interiors, overworld tiles, revised player sprite, some revised enemy sprites, and a few new (unused in Z3) enemies.

Pretty much everyone who've been begging for a Z3 tileset, have all been wanting a true scale, rip of the overworld tiles from Z3, so there's that.

I've never been a fan of those 'pancake' mountains either, but that's my take on it.

The rest of the enemy sprites, and all the boss sprites are identical between Z3 and PW.

A full-scale tileset is the sort of thing I'd use as a pack-in template quest, with all the enemies, and bosses set up (scripts, sprites, tiles, in the enemy editor) so that a user can load the template, and build with it, without needing to manually load any of that, or hunt any of it down.

I'm doing the same thing for a Gameboy template, and what's stalling both of these templates, is the lack of a complete tileset for either genre. The eventual goal is to allow a user, on starting ZQuest, to start making a quest from a (pre-included) template.

If I were to make the tilesets for these, intending them to be used as mainstream templates, I'm pretty sure people would be unhappy as my tileset (and combo table) construction methodology is unorthodox, where any logical system exists, at all, at all.

I really have no clue how to build graphics packs for humans to use.

Edited by ZoriaRPG, 15 September 2016 - 04:07 PM.

[FireSeraphim]

@ZoriaRPG: Did you just gloss over the OP? I pretty much stated my intent in there and this isn't going to be 100% identical to ALTTP, but it is going to be my take on a "ALTTP Plus" styled tileset.

 

Edit: I don't appreciate the subtle "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" manipulation you're trying to pull on me with the last post of yours. That is all.

Edited by FireSeraphim, 15 September 2016 - 05:41 PM.

[Shane]

(I see you are using BS style mountains here, too.)

Except those really aren't even remotely BS styled mountains.

 

Tileset is great so far! It's very Z3-esque but isn't afraid to strive to be its own thing also. With a simplistic and familiar colour scheme and a nice variety of custom tiles I'm sure this will be an instant hit. Keep up the good work and be sure to keep to your own vision.

[Eddy]

I'm really liking how this tileset is shaping up so far. Those screenshots are really nice and it's pretty cool how you can re-scale some of those tiles, it makes a really nice looking product IMO. Good luck with the rest of this tileset!

[FireSeraphim]

Thank you Shane and Eddy for your critique and support. I got another batch of preview screenshots, although these might be a bit iffy.

 

 

To simply put it, screenshots three, four and six show Sludge's mountains being literally pushed to their breaking point and I feel that I might very well need to ask and or commision someone to improve and further expand on 'em.

[FireSeraphim]

Just as I was jumping over to another tab, my computer suddenly and without warning restarted itself, Not cool. >_<

@Shane and Eddy: Thank you guys for supporting me.

 

Edit: Thank goodness my post wasn't devoured like I thought it was.

Edited by FireSeraphim, 18 September 2016 - 04:27 AM.

[Demonlink]

Sweet mother of SNES! A GB LTTP!? Well, in size that is... almost. Wow, this actually looks beautiful! I wish you great luck on this project FireSeraphim, but I don't think you need it given I have seen some of your amazing work!

[Dart Zaidyer]

Hi,

 

please re-rip the palettes from A Link to the Past directly, if you haven't already.

 

Orion once told me he used software that carelessly ruined everything it touched while he was creating the original A Link to the Past tileset. He had a bad CRT monitor in those days and didn't notice until it was too late. Palettes were the worst affected, they got washed out and some colors were lost entirely. On top of this, many tiles were corrupted, losing some of the color definition they were meant to have, which meant they had to be redrawn by hand. He fixed what he could but the scars are still with us today. (Please compare the Eyegore Statues from every tileset you've ever seen against the original ones in A Link to the Past. Hey look, they're all different from A Link to the Past in exactly the same way!)

I taught myself how to carefully and efficiently grab the palettes so I could fix everything for an eventual update, but I never got around to finishing.

[FireSeraphim]

@Dart Zaidyer, When I was snapshotting the overworld palettes I used ZMZ, an accurate SNES emulator, although any outside help on that part would be great as well. As for the dungeon palletes, I'm sampling them from this huge megamap. Notice how all the dungeon walls in this megamap seem to default to the vanilla light world dungeon walls? (even the caves!)

I have reasons to believe that this map was directly dumped from ALTTP's raw data somehow and thus making it's pallete reliable and accurate.

 

Again any outside assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Edited by FireSeraphim, 21 September 2016 - 12:07 AM.

[Dart Zaidyer]

There are a few methods I used to speed up the process.

 

I use Graphics Gale's palette editor for handling and arranging the palettes into something ZQuest-friendly.

 

Hyrule Magic (the romhacking tool) allows you to load and modify every palette in the rom. You can't dump them, but you can take a screenshot of the window, crop it down to just the palette display, and use Graphics Gale to turn it into a 256-color image. It will smartly discard duplicates (and there are a lot of them, and they aren't necessarily always in the same place, especially with the Level palettes), leaving you with a perfectly accurate table of colors to work with. The result will need to be rearranged by hand into something ZQuest-friendly.

 

By far the fastest method is actually running an old copy of ZSNES 1.36 in Dosbox. As far as I know, that version of ZSNES has a decently accurate color table despite being infamously inaccurate for everything else. When you take screenshots with it, it spits out a 256-color PCX file with all the currently-loaded palettes correctly arranged as they appear in the game's memory (You'll recognize it because it's the same as what Hyrule Magic shows you), the same way ZC and ZQuest can do.

 

The trick after that is deciding what to keep, because A Link to the Past uses a LOT of colors per level sometimes. I was astonished to find out just how many.

[Moonbread]

This is shaping up pretty nicely.  ALttP's graphics have never been perfectly suitable for ZC due to their size, but this looks like a good compromise that keeps the aesthetic and adds a bit of touching up for the sake of smaller screen size.  My only issue is the trees that aren't from ALttP/FSA, since they kind of don't fit the aesthetic as well, but I don't mind them being in, I'll just avoid using them myself.

 

I look forward to checking this out once it's done.

[FireSeraphim]

for the last few days or so I been working on getting the caves and house tiles for the Phoenix Tileset set up but I will confess that I would like to take a break from working on the tileset but I don't necessarily want progress on it to flat out halt, so I'm wondering if there's anyone else who might be interested in picking up the slack and getting the dungeon tiles comboed up while I take a reprieve.