So lately I have been working on a little program and now I need some feedback.
PLANOMETRIC CREATOR
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(http://www.lumpcity.co.uk/~drscary/PCreator/demo.png)
With the planometric creator you can easily create backgrounds in the style of games like "A Friend Indeed" (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=12273.0), or RPGs.
It sports 10 layers to draw on, so you can separate walls that are to be switched on and off in the game and save them as separate sprites.
It will import tilesets placed in the game folder as long as they comply with a few requirements:
- no bigger than 480x256
- filename must start with "tile"
- bmp format
- transparent color has to be set to the AGS compatible 255,0,255.
- tiles can not be smaller than 16x16 px, and length and height must always be dividable by 16.
(on many tilesets this is not the case, but a quick recoloring in Paint will fix that.)
For now only a test tileset made in a few minutes by yours truly are included in the ZIP, but additional tilesets are available here (http://www.gamingw.net/resource/6).
DOWNLOAD (http://www.lumpcity.co.uk/~drscary/PCreator/PCreator.zip)
I eagerly await your feedback! :)
EDIT: Small whoops with the first version when exporting images. It's now corrected.
EDIT:EDIT: Maybe I should also inform you that you can resize the sprite selector by right click-and-drag over the spritesheet. Also added a demo screenshot.
This looks handy. I anticipate many more planometric RPGs!
Is planometric a real word?
Heh. I don't really know. It was the word used to describe the perspective used in "A Friend Indeed", so I adopted it for this program. I Googled planometric and found it didn't really look like this at all, so if anybody could suggest a more accurate term for it I am ready to change the name. :)
I'll try to make some more tiles and things like furniture to add some more usefulness to it.
Anybody experienced any performance related problems with it? 10 dynamic sprites at 800x600 on screen at the same time might run slow on some machines.
EDIT: I made this utility to help those one-man projects who want to focus on story rather than learn how to draw first. For those I could also reccommend this utility (http://charas-project.net/charas2/index.php) for the fast generation of basic characters.
I believe, if I remember correctly, that Andail termed it "Parallelometric" ... I could be mistaken; it was quite awhile back.
I think this sounds handy, and I'd be interested to see what people can do with it. I, obviously, am a fan of this style of graphics.
That's not planometric, although I don't have time to go into the details of planometric just now.
However, to ensure this isn't a completely negative post:
Around the time of A Friend Indeed the same thing came up (that it wasn't isometric or planometric) which led to someone (I think it was Andail) coining the term "Parallelometric" to describe this style of drawing. Personally, I quite like that.
EDIT: Gah, Darth beat me to it :P And also I forgot to mention the program itself. Well, I'll download it just now & comment on it later! :)
Psuedo 3D I think may be the term.
I also saw it described somewhere as "top down tweaked to add depth" but that was a less catchy name. You can also use this program to draw with isometric tiles, but then some precautions must be made by the user.
My hope is that people who use this will add their own tilesets so that the library can be quite big as time goes by.
Thanks for the feedback so far. I will keep working on it then! :)