AMOS TOME Series IV Manual  Index Prev Page Next Page 36

The Tile Maker

Tile Grabbing Utility

Before you design your TOME Maps, you need tiles. Tiles are the small pieces that your map will be made up from and are stored in memory as AMOS Icons. In TOME, the tiles are always the same size as each other, thus the map can be updated and checked with great speed. As explained earlier in the manual, there are 4 different possible sizes of tile. They are : 16x16, 16x32, 32x16 and 32x32.

Tiles are normally drawn as a screen in an art package such as DPaint. This involves making up a screen, starting from the top left corner and working across, then down a line of tiles and so on. For 32x32 pixel tiles for instance, they would be stored on the screen in the following order:-

   0  - 1  - 2  - 3  - 4  - 5  - 6  - 7  - 8  - 9
   10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19
   etc. ---

Depending upon how you like to draw your graphics, you can if you like, put a 1 pixel gap between each tile. Other graphics artists prefer to draw the tiles as a large block, without the gap.

It is best to design your tiles on a 320 pixel wide lowres screen, as this is the size the Tile Maker was designed to handle. You can make the screen as high as you want, but always remember that TOME can only use 256 tiles. The Tile Maker is the utility (now built into the TOME Editor) that takes these tile screens and turns them into actual tiles. It has several options, which can save you memory, and make life easier. These will also be detailed here.

When designing your tiles, you should bear in mind the fact that you will need to use them to make up a screen, and to get the most out of them, you need to design them as tiles, rather than designing a screen and cutting it up into tiles. Because of the sizing of the tiles, and the way they are placed, it is also better to design your objects that the tiles will make up with the size of the tiles in mind. It isn't very efficient for instance to design a building block that is 24 pixels wide when using 16x16 pixel tiles, as this will waste half a tile in width and will not be able to connect on at least one side with similar blocks. By making the block 16 or 32 pixels wide, you will be able to connect them together on the map.