[Tutorial] Defining Passability (Patreon)

henlo today we will be taking a foray into the tileset editor to show those of you who are not familiar with RPG Maker how I set various attributes for maps such as for which blocks you can walk through and for which blocks you'll have to report the fact that you can walk through when you shouldn't be able to

pictured above is the tilesets tab of the database. we select one on the left, and then change the details on the right. i'll go over the various options.

Name is straight forward. Graphic selects the graphic file to be used. Feel enlightened yet?

Autotiles a separate graphic of tile saved and stored separately. We can choose which autotiles to use with each tileset, but only up to 7. Autotiles have two uses-- they can be animated tiles, or they can be tiles like ground pathways that automatically adjust to their surrounding when place. or both, such as water. those of you who attended a recent stream may remember i used autotiles for the sand pits. those of you who saw the DPTG mapping stream may remember i used them for the ground (and also that RMMV removed the 7-autotile restriction which is a godsend because i run out in reborn a Lot)

The reason only 7 are allowed is because RMXP is old. Just kidding-- auto tiles are set to take up the top row, but the top left corner of the tileset is a blank passable space with 5* priority (we'll cover later) to be used as a default tile on all layers. If that tile didn't exist the map would become totally filled in with whatever tile was in that spot. Gross. So RMXP forces the blank spot. Older version of of RM didn't do this-- it was possible for a tileset made in poor foresight to have no blank space. oops. 

the Panorama is the graphic that displays behind the map. Panoramas are used for the sky in Ametrine, the backgrounds of some places like viewing apophyll from pyrous, etc. however, in those cases i dont typically use this option. tileset-set panorama does not play nice with how essentials keeps the view centered on the player (unlike normal RPG Maker), and it plays particularly poorly with map connections. instead, on maps like those, i have an event that sets the panorama (also lets me do day/night) and then kills itself on the spot.

the Fog graphic sets a graphic to display over the map. this has the same kind of problems the panorama does, and 3rd gen pokemon games dont use fogs (even though they make shit look bomb af) so i don't use this. however we do have several places where fog is used in game-- obviously the coral ward, but also the sunbeams in the aventurine woods, leaf pattern in rhodocrine, etc. these are fogs that are set by another self-terminating event like above.

the battleback graphic would define the background used for battles on those maps in a normal RPG, but i believe it does not have effect in Essentials because Essentials gets that information from a metadata file separately. 

now for the main area where the tileset is displayed. the options on the right click between several settings we can place per tile. you'll notice right now we're on the Passage setting, which allows you to click O or X for each tile. O means it can be walked on. X means it can't. Boom boom. Other versions of RPG maker filter priority into this part too, or wall tile designation (which has never really been useful so whatever)

next is the 4 directional passage tab. it switches to a view like this:

this lets us define which sides a player can walk on a tile from. as you can see, by default it allows all four sides. a tile that can't be walked on has them clicked off to dots (you can see on the blank space in the middle there-- i mark spaces like that on most tilesets as an invisible block for events to use). these can be turned on or off individually. if any or on, or all are off, it will automatically switch the tile to O or X accordingly in the other tab. 

these directions are useful for things like signs where you can walk in front of them but not through them, and essentials in particular also uses them for ledges. a ledge uses a special terrain tag (we'll get to it) that hops the player over it whenever they step on it, but in order to make it one direction only, we use this setting. here you can see the ledges are set to only allow the player to walk on them from the direction they would jump down from. this is what makes them work.

next is the priority tab. 

priority is set per tile from 0-5 stars. the star is what was used on old RPG Makers in the passage tab (and was inherently passable-- just under it), so it's a longstanding priority symbol for RM. the higher the star count, the higher up it displays. it's important to note that this does not take effect in the editor which is why sometimes things that look fine mapped in-editor have bizarre tiles stacked up in-game. 

at 5 stars the tile has no bearing on the passability of tiles below it. you can see i have 5 stars set on the blank tiles besides the tree for that reason-- missing that can cause passability errors because the passability of those tiles is applied to impassable things below it. at 1 star, the tile is in front of objects behind it, but behind objects in front of it. everything above 1 star just displays on top of everything. using all 5 stars is very rarely necessary. i do that on trees, as you can see above, but even then the same effect could be achieved with 2 stars on every tree tile. they exist as a just-in-case.

next is the bush and counter flags. i won't bother screenshotting these because they're so zzz. both of them are simple on/off settings for every tile, and they are barely used. 

the counter flag makes it so you can talk to npcs over it, one tile away. it is used for shop counters and the pokemon center. it is not very useful because you could just put an event to talk to on the counter itself. it saves one event though. woo. i guess its also nice if the person behind the counter is moving around. 

the bush flag makes the bottom part of the player's sprite semi-transparent when walking over the tile. it has no other function. we use it for tall grass and nothing else. it's not like it even makes the tall grass do anything. for that we use terrian tags.

so, last up is that. 

terrain tags are often negligible in the typical RPG, but very important for Essentials. they are used to define the special attributes of many types of things such as ledges, tall grass, water, etcetcetc. the tileset editor has a clicker for the value. it goes up to 7. 

this is not nearly enough for Essentials, so Essentials has a separate editor for terrain tags in the debug menu in-game, which can go up to 99. this overwrites the setting into RPG Maker and it doesn't know what to do with it, so it just displays a blank instead of a number. you can see that on the grime water tile near the top of the above image, and the puddle in the bottom left-- missing a number indicates that the terrain tag has been overwritten with one from essentials. 

below is a list of the terrain tags that reborn has:

• 0- None
• 1- Ledge
  2- Grass -- displays an animation as walked through and has encounters
• 3- Sand (we dont actually use this because it just sets the battle back, which we handle differently)
• 4- Rock (same as above)
• 5- Deep Water-- can be dived in
• 6- Still Water-- can be surfed or fished in and has a reflection
• 7- Water-- can be surfed or fished in
• 8- Waterfall-- can be gone up with HM
• 9- Waterfall crest-- can be gone down without HM (changed to disallow for reborn's set up)
• 10- Tall Grass -- has encounters and cannot be biked through
• 11- Underwater grass-- uses a different animation (is there one at all?? cant remember) and has encounters
• 12- Ice-- slip n slide
• 13- Neutral-- this is a tile to go over water tiles for things like docks and cliffs. it overwrites the terrain tag below them so that they can't be surfed on. if you've seen the error where the player can surf on land, it's usually cuz one of these is needed somewhere.
• 14- Soot Grass-- unused in reborn, adds soot and changes to grass when walked through, has encounters
• 15- Bridge-- a bridge tile that can be switched on and off for walking over water. unused in reborn since there aren't really bridges over water the way this is set up for
• 16- Puddle-- beyond this point is custom tags we've added for reborn. this one displays a reflection but has no encounters, surfing or fishing. first used in azurine island
• 17- Grime Water -- can be fished in, but not surfed on.
• 18- PokePuddle -- a version of the puddle tag that has encounters on it similar to that one area in B/W. i believe this was used in the sewers. 
• 19- Dummy -- cant remember why this exists and im not sure if it's used at all offhand... since we added it it probably is, but im not sure.
• 20- Conveyor belt down-- pushes the player downwards. used in Devonyx's puzzle. the rest as the same
• 21- Conveyor left
• 22- Conveyor right
• 23- Conveyor up
• 24- Sand dunes-- slows the player when walking over it. i mentioned before i was going to have the ridges act as ledges, and then i tried having them be impassible when going from dark to light, but both of those were very restricting and felt inconsistent, so we created this effect instead. 

and that's a wrap! now i guess i need to actually set this stuff for all the tilesets i've created for 17. i was deluding myself into thinking i'd do this as i made this post. hahahaa.