Quick Question

[Mario Gamer]

So about this Mario ripping project, how are we supposed to complete it if the rule of "the backgrounds have to come apart" is still in place? I ripped sheets from Mario Golf but all were taken off the main site for being "Unusable" a few years back. Which personally, I see them being useful for cutscenes or a LOZ:MC type game...

So what is the deal with this? Is the rule still on or has it been revoked?

Discuss

This post has been edited by Mario Gamer on Mar 3 2008, 10:42 PM

[Black Squirrel]

Yeah that rule's still in place, and for a good reason (although honestly some of those aren't that bad). See the way most games consoles work is that they store graphics in 8x8 "tiles". Nobody gives an ass about sprites having all the tiles together but for backgrounds you're much more limited. By submitting just maps (which are essentially just assembled tiles) major editing is needed to make rooms that aren't exactly like the ones in game, which is a pain. They're not "useless" as such, but without editing them they are... sort of.

An example:

(Note that I've used 16x16 here because with this amount of detail it's not worth doing 8x8 rips)

Part 1 is a section of one of your rips. Straight from the way the game assembles it. That's fine but not everyone wants it assembled like that.

Part 2 is a very messy "splitting" of the tiles into 16x16 chunks. Might be a pixel or two off but it looks reasonable. However the most important thing now is that it's not just limited to being one single room... it can be a heap of different rooms by re-arranging the tiles. This = use, and it's only a two minute job from a ripped map.

Part 3 is a condensed version of part 2 where I've removed the repeated tiles. Not neccessary, but as the final thing will probably be huge this can help.


From the looks of things ripping the tilesets of Mario Golf will be long and painful, but at least it's fairly obvious where the tiles lie.