Designing a level editor

A place for your artistic side. Discuss techniques and tools for pixel art on the NES, GBC, or similar platforms.

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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

The Sonic Advance games use 96x96-pixel metatiles I think.

If a game uses metatiles there will always be cases where objects don't align properly to the grid. You you really don't want to deal with that, maybe you'd be better using the object approach rather than the grid approach.
tepples
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Post by tepples »

tokumaru wrote:The Sonic Advance games use 96x96-pixel metatiles I think.
Which would sort of fit a game that may have been originally planned for a system with a 320x224 pixel display (Genesis) and then scaled down to 240x160 (GBA).
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

I had never thought about this, but you are absolutely right! The number of blocks that fit in a screen horizontally is the same. The GBA games are nothing like the Genesis games though, so I'm not sure why they'd go through the trouble of using an odd metatile size like that... An obvious disadvantage is that when converting world coordinates into metatile coordinates the program has to perform actual divisions, instead of simply shifting/ignoring bits. On the NES this would be suicide.
tepples
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Post by tepples »

ARM7TDMI has a fast hardware multiply, and lots of GBA games use it for division by a constant.
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