EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

[JJ Naas]

Would anyone be able to explain what sorts of tilesets are the bg graphs of these kinds of classic RPGs made of? I've never managed to see a site where I could view a complete tileset of these games. Even better would be a graph engine to play around with, I've wanted to try my hands on these kinds of graphics for a very long time.


Black Crypt, difficult as hell


Dungeon Master's 16 -colour awesomeness included bgs and monsters fading towards black if your torch went off..


Eye of the Beholder 2

[ptoing]

I don't think there are "tiles" as such, not in the practical sense anyway. Since there is not fluid scrolling in those games you just have different views of the corridors and that's fine enough. Overlay enemies as sprites, done.

[Helm]

Graham Lackey has made a few tilesets for such things. They way they work is that LEFT NEAR WALL, RIGHT NEAR WALL, NEAR CEILING, NEAR FLOOR are pieces of art and then FAR LEFT, FAR RIGHT etc are other pieces of art (usually resized versions of the near stuff if the artist has any sense) and then stuff is overlayed on top of that basic tileset. There are a couple engines for making dungeons like these, I will summon Lackey to explain such to you.

[Lackey]

HELLO

*emerges from the pit*

I learned about these kind of first person tiles when I was mucking about with Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures, which is this old DOS program for making those SSI D&D games.  I've always had a soft spot for this kind of art, even though I usually find the games extremely dreary.  Buck Rogers is cool though.

You might want to investigate Dungeon Craft as it's a modernized version of UA.  Certainly it's enough to mess around with wallsets, anyway.

Y'anyway you might also want to look at a template of a wallset !

(transparency turned off so you can see where they fit)

So basically yes, left and right walls and a facing wall, which are assembled by the game as it goes.  Let's look at how a receeding corridor would look:


So this makes sense for how the tiles are arranged, nay?  You might notice a little oddity though.  Those pink lines showing the perspective lines?  They don't converge to a point.  I guess this is so they can always fit that wall in there?  I'm really not sure.  But it results in a little oddity...

See how the wall actually gets wider as you back away?  It's the reason that FRUA tiles are designed so the first tile is always the base wall with features layered on top:


The wood planks are the base wall tile, and the door, fireplace are drawn on top of it.  This way features don't get duplicated a bunch to fill in the space.  This I learned from an error in Dungeon Craft, actually, because it treated all tiles equally so if you backed away from a door it would become three doors at some point in the distance.

Now black crypt has much more clever art.  You can see they added darkening as things recede.  This is a very good idea, you'll always be able to match the relative darkness of the facing walls up too, of course, because it's tile based.  I like the higher horizon line too, as it suggests a low dungeon ceiling.

I would guess based on your Dungeon Master screenshot that the tiles would be arranged something like this:

It has a proper vanishing point too!

The other thing is that from what I've seen it looks like some console RPGs of this sort actually use smaller tiles to form the bigger wall chunks.  I'm not sure how that would work.  Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to set up your own system for making the wall pieces.  As for a graphics engine to play around with, I'd love one too    Unfortunately being the old DOS beast that it is I can't recommend FRUA, it's just too much work getting stuff into the engine, and last time I checked I don't think you can do Dungeon Craft on lower resolutions.

Heck if you want to make a challenge of this though, I could see making our own little template and just assembling some mockups manually.  Could be fun 

[Helm]

Oh I'm totally in for a mockup challenge. We can do better than these artists (well, perhaps not Westwood that did EOB and Lands of Lore, they were masters...)

One dungeon set, one creature, one set of avatars for team below and perhaps a few weapons. Definitely in!

[Dusty]

Never done one of these, but it definitely sounds cool. I'd be in too.

[Lee N]

Since there is not fluid scrolling in those games you just have different views of the corridors and that's fine enough.

Phantasy Star on the Master System have fluid scrolling of 3D dungeons, and it does use tiles to draw everything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1YskvlZqqk

[Helm]

These are 'whole screen' animations stored in 8x8 tiles most probably and with relevant bits changed on the screen orientation according to what geometry they needed. It's not really very difficult to see how it's made.

[Lee N]

with relevant bits changed on the screen orientation according to what geometry they needed.

Isn't that true for all tile-based games? Also, how does it contradict the fact that it does have fluid animations with a tile set? Tile animations are hardly exclusive to this game.

[chriskot]

The first (and maybe only) one of these games that I ever played was Double Dungeons for the TG16. It wasn't such a great game by any stretch of the imagination, but it also did the smooth-scrolling thing Lee N was talking about. I actually had a hunch as to how the spriting is done because you could see bands in between the wall images of different depths. You can sort of see them in this picture:

(Excuse the jpeg)


Like a bunch of concentric boxes. There wasn't much work put into making the tiles blend together, especially not the bits of ceiling, but I think that's why it really helps illustrate how it's done.

[JJ Naas]

Lackey: Interesting points about the perspective.

Aren't we talking about two different genres here though? At least in terms of real time / turn based?

 EOB, BC and DM take place in real time, the fighting and using the inventory happening in real time on the screen (although less so in EOB where the action stops while the enemies animate whereas in DM and BC it is not so). In games like Buck Rogers, the AD&D Gold Box games, old Ultima games (and Akalabeth, which I think started the genre) we have a 1st person dungeon view, but we move into a different turn based view when bumping into enemies. And then there's the Might and Magic series, where the view remains the same when fighting an enemy, but once you start the fight the foe glues on to the screen until the fight is over.

A challenge sounds absolutely awesome, I'm all for it but I'd like to do it based on the real time version of this genre.

(Oh, Lands of Lore is missing from my list. And Knightmare as well, which was pretty good once you cleared the annoying starting area in the garden and got into the dungeons.)

[Lackey]

I thought Dungeon Master was still step based right?  I haven't played it in a long time.

for the tile setup the genre of the actual game shouldn't really make a difference though, it just means you need to draw more frames for the monsters

I'd like to do real-time challenge as well, really.

Another question because I haven't looked at enough Dungeon Master art: does it seem to use floor and ceiling tiles or is something like that trap just an overlay?

Hired Guns for Amiga seems to use a somewhat more complicated system.  Note the two-level building and the variation in the floor tiles.  It's not just walls on top of a backdrop.

Knightmare looks awesome, thanks for pointing it out.  Maybe it's a lot of layered objects or something?  That's what it looks like to me.  Anyway, there wouldn't be any set way of doing this type of game, it really just depends on how you want to make it, I guess.

[Helm]

I'm pretty certain dungeon master has a top screen single bitmap ceiling an a bottom single bitmap floor and you get to see as much of it as the specific screen geometry allows and stuff is overlayed on top of it. That's how Black Crypt and EOB and probably all the other stuff besides Unlimited Adventures work too

[JJ Naas]

I thought Dungeon Master was still step based right?  I haven't played it in a long time.

No, DM was the one that introduced real time in 1987.

for the tile setup the genre of the actual game shouldn't really make a difference though, it just means you need to draw more frames for the monsters

No, I guess it doesn't make a difference.. in turn based games the 1st person view window is usually a bit smaller and for some reason square, where as in real time games it's a rectangle.

...

On a curious side note, see how the graphs flip around horizontally:

[ptoing]

Is there a confusion between step based movement and turn based combat vs realtime combat going on?

[Helm]

Yes. Let's be clearer:

Most of these games are real-time. In that the engine doesn't pause for turns in combat, although the combat is still pretty turn-based. Some of them (like Phantasy Star for the Master System) pause when you enter a fight and you get turns in the oldschool fashion, or even a whole tactical screen like gold box SSI games. Historically the latter stuff predates the 'real time' that came later. This is why the dungeon screens in older games are smaller (check Bard's Tale series or Wizardry or old Ultima games, that's where this sort of graph representation starts anyway).

On the other hand in most of these games stepping in the dungeon is usually done from teleporting from one 3d tile to the next one, no smooth movement. Some games like Anvil of Dawn (more recent) or Phantasy Star have drawn animations for the inbetweens. This doesn't change whether a game is real-time or not. Anvil of Dawn has real-time combat, Phantasy Star not.

What we should do I propose for the challenge is go for that 'sweet spot' where the tiled 3d dungeon was at is graphical peak (Lands of Lore, EOB2-3, Anvil of Dawn, etc) but just before they started using actual 3d engines (Ultima Underworld, Ravenloft games, Menzoberanzan etc). Of course if someone wants to make a CGA dungeon be my guest.

[Lackey]

Yeah, sorry for the confusion.  I meant step-based because you move whole tiles at a time.  A step-based game can be either real time or turn-based and have real-time or turn-based combat, they are not exclusive features.

A turn-based game with real time combat would be something 

As for the mirroring.  I figure they do what you've illustrated so that the walls don't repeat so visibly.  Think of it this way: if the walls on either side or identical, and you're in a long tunnel with no features on the walls, you would have no visual indicator that you'd moved a step forward.  You could make a different left and right wall and just flip them every step.  Although I'm not sure how they're doing it there.

[Cow]

Of course if someone wants to make a CGA dungeon be my guest.

Amazing game.

Also an activity based on this sounds really fun, I've always been into these sort of games and also have always secretly wanted to make one. So, please.

[JJ Naas]

I put EOB2 in Dosbox to see if I'd still be able to enjoy it..  I was, even now I'm itching to get back to playing it.

Thanks for clearing out the confusion about the genres btw.

EOB2 is step based but slightly less real time than Dungeon Master because the game occasionally freezes for a tiny moment to animate. I don't understand really why they had to put the direction arrows to be clicked on the screen, that just encourages people to use them which is less enjoyable than playing with one hand on the keyboard for movement and the other hand on the mouse controlling fighting and inventory. One thing I found playing it to be very refreshing was its relentlessness. Dying a lot (for the sake of your own mistakes) and loading again was indeed once a way how you played games, and EOB2 really punishes you for not paying attention to what goes on on the screen. Grinding is possible, but it'll only get you so far. You can grind all you like, but one mistake in a wrong place and you're dead. Still, it's too difficult only if you don't pay attention or pay any mind to tactics within the limits that the game mechanics allow.

The sounds are a bit flat and midi-ish. By the time EOB2 was released PC games were still lagging far behind in terms of how sounds and music were dealt with on other platforms. I wish I could bash the enemies in the head with a portcullis or drop them into a pit, like in DM. Randomly spawning enemies are also sometimes an annoyance, although it may be a matter of taste. I've never ever liked randomly spawning enemies. Once you've cleared an area it should bloody well remain cleared. In Zelda games I always got fed up with that after a while and in the end just ran past enemies. And FF's random encounters.. don't even talk to me about it. I don't remember how it was in Oblivion.. Anyway, in DM areas remained cleaned after you'd killed all the enemies, except in places where their random spawning was a puzzle element. One thing I like about these games is that they are so compact. No randomly generated dungeons or any crap like that. There's so much fighting and puzzles packed per each square meter. No huge landscapes where it takes forever to get from one end to the other, just a relatively small play area in today's standars, full of action. That's what I'd like to see more in games. Advancing a mere ten meters in a dungeon requires a lot of fighting and puzzle solving. (And dying and loading.)

The grapics are just awesome. The level design is much better than in EOB1, where you spent most of the time being completely lost in a labyrinth.

[Lackey]

I approve of your taste, sir, and would enjoy continuing this conversation 

EOB2 is step based but slightly less real time than Dungeon Master because the game occasionally freezes for a tiny moment to animate. I don't understand really why they had to put the direction arrows to be clicked on the screen, that just encourages people to use them which is less enjoyable than playing with one hand on the keyboard for movement and the other hand on the mouse controlling fighting and inventory.

It's also that much slower which is bad for a real-time game, no?  See this policy crashed when they ported some of the genre features over to early real-time 3D games like Menzoberranzan and Ravenloft which have gorgeous pixel art for the sprites sprites, some of the most charming character portraits I know, and me and Helm would argue the best looking paper dolls in an RPG.  The thing is the games feel like controlling a tank because they really didn't tweak the controls for the whole real-time 3d thing.  It feels really cludgy and awful.

I've never ever liked randomly spawning enemies. Once you've cleared an area it should bloody well remain cleared. In Zelda games I always got fed up with that after a while and in the end just ran past enemies. And FF's random encounters.. don't even talk to me about it. I don't remember how it was in Oblivion..

Much agreement about randomly spawning enemies.  Oblivion didn't have randomly spawning enemies, and you could clear dungeons.  They would come back after a matter of days, though.

One thing I like about these games is that they are so compact. No randomly generated dungeons or any crap like that. There's so much fighting and puzzles packed per each square meter.

Funny you mention this as I was going to mention Dungeon Hack which is basically Eye of the Beholder...with randomly generated dungeons.

Dungeon Master is really a pretty clever game though, ahead of it's time in a lot of ways, and well, one of those games where it looks like the developers didn't feel too hindered by what other RPGs were doing.  They just went ahead and made their dungeon game!

There was another game I wanted to mention on the subect of graphics, because I couldn't think of the name earlier, and that's this old Psygnosis game Obitus.  It's not a very good game, not much of a dungeon crawler, and the levels are seperated by awful sidescrolling sections (oh, Psygnosis ) but it's notable because the tiles use 8 directional movement.  This is a cool idea, and it makes the forests seem a lot less mechanical (even when you're running into impassible bush walls all over).

Anyway, about for the challenge.  I'm glad you mention Eye of the Beholder because that's what I've been building my template on.  I started free-handing it in the same 176x200 sized viewport as is common to the Eye of the Beholder games (and a few others, oddly) but when I overlayed what I had drawn on an actual screenshot it lined up almost exactly I guess a lot of these decisions are kind of intuitive when you're looking at how to assemble the tiles on that black canvas.  For example: making the lower edge of the walls a 45 degree angle to the horizon is pretty convenient.  After that I pretty much just traced the wall sizes as accurately as I could.

So this is bascially how everything lines up, but it's kind of hard to look at (in my image file it's all layered, thankfully):


This is it seperated into the different image files you'd need to build a wall set:


"E", "F", and "G" were a little surprising because I hadn't considered them, but of course walls parallel to the player should be visible off to the sides as well and the perspective is notably different.  In EoB games they usually fade to black by "D."

So tenative restrictions are to do this: a wall set (16 colours, image size...variable), a background (same colours as wall set), 4 character portraits (16 colours for all, 32x32 pixels each), an interface (16 colours again, basically a full 320x200 screen that this viewport and the portraits would fit into somewhere), and maybe a monster set (4 directions at 3 sizes, or whatever).  Or maybe do a few wall sets (wall, door, ruined wall, etc.) and some overlay objects like torches or grates or what-have.  Roll the palette for the overlays into the one for the monster set.

Anyway, this is very flexible and I'm just describing it so you have something to chew on.  I very much want people's input on this if they're interested in participating.  Colour restrictions are just theoretical.  The games are actually 256 colours and it looks like often they use a global palette, but I usually find it more difficult to be clever with virtually no restrictions like that, so I think it's a good idea to make it something a bit challenging.

[JJ Naas]

I approve of your taste, sir, and would enjoy continuing this conversation 

Thanks, me too. These are interesting games and I've spent a lot of time thinking about them and playing them.

Funny you mention this as I was going to mention Dungeon Hack which is basically Eye of the Beholder...with randomly generated dungeons.

I've never played that.. I believe I was still trying to find something to play on my Amiga by the time this game was out.

Dungeon Master is really a pretty clever game though, ahead of it's time in a lot of ways, and well, one of those games where it looks like the developers didn't feel too hindered by what other RPGs were doing.  They just went ahead and made their dungeon game!

I remember having read an article in Edge quite a few years back on the making of DM.. and if I remember correctly, the developer team really figured out they were on to something when they ditched the idea of going into a separate view / screen when picking up stuff on the floor and said: why not just pick them up and manipulate them in the game view. So, even my sister, who was 10 years old at the time played DM and finished it, because it was so easy and sraightforward to figure out.

There was another game I wanted to mention on the subect of graphics, because I couldn't think of the name earlier, and that's this old Psygnosis game Obitus.  It's not a very good game, not much of a dungeon crawler, and the levels are seperated by awful sidescrolling sections (oh, Psygnosis ) but it's notable because the tiles use 8 directional movement.  This is a cool idea, and it makes the forests seem a lot less mechanical (even when you're running into impassible bush walls all over).

I haven't played that either. The logo is SO Psygnosis. Looks good though and the art is very atmospheric.

"E", "F", and "G" were a little surprising because I hadn't considered them, but of course walls parallel to the player should be visible off to the sides as well and the perspective is notably different.  In EoB games they usually fade to black by "D."

In DM there's a hint of that part of the wall to be seen, in EOB it's just black.

So tenative restrictions are to do this: a wall set (16 colours, image size...variable), a background (same colours as wall set), 4 character portraits (16 colours for all, 32x32 pixels each), an interface (16 colours again, basically a full 320x200 screen that this viewport and the portraits would fit into somewhere), and maybe a monster set (4 directions at 3 sizes, or whatever).  Or maybe do a few wall sets (wall, door, ruined wall, etc.) and some overlay objects like torches or grates or what-have.  Roll the palette for the overlays into the one for the monster set.

Anyway, this is very flexible and I'm just describing it so you have something to chew on.  I very much want people's input on this if they're interested in participating.  Colour restrictions are just theoretical.  The games are actually 256 colours and it looks like often they use a global palette, but I usually find it more difficult to be clever with virtually no restrictions like that, so I think it's a good idea to make it something a bit challenging.

Sounds good. I was thinking of something similar. 16 colours for the bg and monsters and a separate 16 colour palette for the interface and character portraits.

....

And some games we haven't mentioned yet: Ishar 1-3. Ishar 3 has got some really good art and some not so good.. photo traces for some characters I believe. Then, Abandoned Places 1-2 and Bloodwych, which wasn't much of a game but had a two-player option on a split screen which was kind of interesting.

[Helm]

I am back. I'm totally making a mockup for this. Really interesting thread to read too!

[Adamo]

JJ Naas wrote:

Would anyone be able to explain what sorts of tilesets are the bg graphs of these kinds of classic RPGs made of? I've never managed to see a site where I could view a complete tileset of these games. Even better would be a graph engine to play around with, I've wanted to try my hands on these kinds of graphics for a very long time.

Yes, there`s a tool called ADGE (Atari Dungeonmaster Graphics Editor). You can extract (and, therefore, modify) all the bitmaps from "Dungeon Master"/ "Chaos Strikes Back" games.
Unfortunatelly, I don`t know how to upload pictures on your site  , so look at the link below.
ADGE tool looks like this (take a look at the pictures): http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/1403

Here`s what you have to do: download a CSBwin program ( http://dmweb.free.fr/files/Clone-CSBwin-PC-DungeonMaster-100.zip ), unpack it, then download ADGE program ( http://dmweb.free.fr/files/Tool-ADGE.net.bin.20080720.rar ), unpack it and install it. Run ADGE and open a file called "graphics.dat". Enjoy the graphics.
The detailed description of a wallsets for DM is descripted somewhere on www.dmweb.free.fr or www.dungeon-master.com sites.

Explanations: CSBwin is an exact translation *modified* of Atari ST code under windows.

[VisMaior]

As for a graphics engine to play around with, I'd love one too   

Ahh, a challenge.

What should such an engine be capable of?

[VisMaior]

Ehh? Noone interested?

Also, Lackeys picture cant be right. the proportions seem off to me. Id need a correct picture to work from.

[Lackey]

Ehh? Noone interested?

Also, Lackeys picture cant be right. the proportions seem off to me. Id need a correct picture to work from.

Heck I'm interested.  I've still got my half-done wallset lying around that I need to finish.

In such a program, could you be able to define tilesets manually?  I would want it to be able to work with different view sizes and tile layouts, maybe.  A little walk-around preview would be nice too.

Also, could you elaborate on how the proportions seem off?  If you have further information it would be really helpful.

[Adamo]

I made my own wallsets, check out the demo, if you`re interested. They`re not very beautifull though:
http://odsiebie.com/pokaz/772967---75e8.html
(download it, unpack it, run csbwin.exe, pick a character and go to level1). On level0 there are original wallsets.

[VisMaior]

OK. so A=130, thats 176/130=1.35 A/screen
B=82, so thats 176/82= 2.14 B/screen
C=48 176/48=3.6666666 C/screen
D=32, 176/32=5.5

so the viewpoint looks like this:


As you can see, the wall proprotions do not align.

Also, if we assume that the observer is in the midpoint of a square that is 1 and looks at the wall, if the wall A completely fills the viewport, then he should see exactly 3 Bs.If he sees more than 1 A, then he should se more than 3 Bs.

[JJ Naas]

I'm still in as well. That program looks interesting. Gotta take some time to study it to see how flexible it is, is it only suitable for editing DM graphichs or can you do something totally new with it with a different and larger palette and so on.

[Adamo]

There`s also a great game called "Conflux" based on CSBwin engine, but almost totally reworked (this is an old Dungeon Master fan-made with a lot of addons):
http://www.dianneandpaul.net/DMwiki/index.php?pagename=ConfluxIII
That`s really good; you might want to try it, though it`s hard as hell.

[VisMaior]

A quick update. Lack of a better option, I reused Lackeys tiles.


Im now modifying the stuff so that it is configurable. Anybody cares to make me some wall tiles?

[VisMaior]

I could make me my own wall tiles, but chancec are I suck at it. Anybody has a spare set lying around?

[Lackey]

Here's the walls from Dungeon Master if you think they would work better as a test:

[Adamo]

have you downloaded my wallsets demo (link 7 posts above)? there is a "skull wallsets" saved in a .bmp file.

[marcuz99]

Hello,
I would like to get in touch with the graphic or pixel artists among you in this thread who have a good grasp on such games wallsetting, as I'm working on a game built on these principles, and for which I've just posted an ad for an hired help or a profit share collaboration, here on Pixelation;
the thread is here:
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=16715.0

Please moderators, do not consider this as spamming, as it is not in the least that, I just really keep finding this particular thread whenever I search on google for wallsetting and I hope that a graphic artist versed in that comes check my ad for a possible collaboration.

Thanks!