AuthorTopic: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..  (Read 36616 times)

Offline JJ Naas

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EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

on: July 22, 2008, 09:23:53 am
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

Offline ptoing

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #1 on: July 22, 2008, 10:49:18 am
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.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Helm

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #2 on: July 22, 2008, 11:00:32 am
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.

Offline Lackey

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #3 on: July 22, 2008, 05:12:00 pm
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  :)
« Last Edit: July 22, 2008, 05:24:48 pm by Lackey »

Offline Helm

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #4 on: July 22, 2008, 05:17:08 pm
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!

Offline Dusty

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #5 on: July 22, 2008, 05:25:33 pm
Never done one of these, but it definitely sounds cool. I'd be in too.

Offline Lee N

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #6 on: July 22, 2008, 05:26:31 pm
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

Offline Helm

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #7 on: July 22, 2008, 05:29:06 pm
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.

Offline Lee N

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #8 on: July 22, 2008, 05:38:35 pm
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.
« Last Edit: July 22, 2008, 05:49:37 pm by Lee N »

Offline chriskot

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Re: EOB, Dungeon Master, Black Crypt..

Reply #9 on: July 22, 2008, 07:16:29 pm
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.