Castube and future releases
 

Ah yeppee. Finally. The world's most wanted one and only tileset combination is finally released. And there are more to come. And you may decide the combination. And I'll make it.

Get Castube v1.0.3 (latest version) here.


Suggestions are welcome. If you would like to see certain tiles to be made/added to this tileset, you may ask. Any fixes you would like to see? You may ask. I've set up a poll on the RRf to select the following combination. Please note that this tileset is the first of a pack with many.

Read the readme for details.

Please do not edit or upload elsewhere without asking.

One and Only?
Huh hah hah HAH HAH!

Okay, the tileset itself isn't really too cool right now - severe lack of transition tiles, and no background - but I do like the motion blur effect. Can I add it to the JCSref article?

sure =D

I'll make horizontal shadow background transition tiles too in a next version

EDIT: poll up!

Added.

No, what I mean is, all you've really got are a few tiles that connect tubelectric platforms with castle platforms, you don't really take advantage of the fact that you have all these graphics available to combine. I'd expect to see more tiles like this:

agreed other wise it just looks like you stuck 2 together.

aha! that's actually an aspect of combining I never thought about.. omg this is ashaming :o ah well everyone vote on the poll too! I'll make some of those nice combo's soon

Link?

the teamfoo tileset "1.25 patch" or whatever was a combination of more then 4 tilesets. So yours isn't first, or the only.

I'm pretty sure it's not as good as this one? }>

Link? Uhh... you go to JCSref, click the topic listing, and then it's called "Motion Blur"...
...oh, fine, here.

oh yeppee I'm in there :lol: I even have a link =)

ah well, I'll probably do some work on 1.0.4 tomorrow.. the first thing I'll do is moving the big font E a few pixels up. it's not perfect now :(

Since I cant vote at the poll, I like to see beach and jungle combined.
So you have the ability to make an island with a beach and at the middle of the island a jungle.

just sign up on the RRf and you should be able to vote :roll:

ah well, I'll just count your vote.. but don't blame me if I forget!

I don't want to start a account just to vote for something. Why don't you start a poll on the JCF?

I dunno if JCF allows 25 options
I dunno if JCF allows you to select how many options must be chosen
I'm quite sure JCF doesn't have the possibility to load the results into a spreadsheet
I try to get people to the RRf and have them read things like my clan news

That doesn't anyhow make your merge "one and only".

After looking at the palettes, every useful color except for 16 of them can be fit into a single palette. In that case, some set of tiles could be adjusted to use 16 other colors from the palette. For example:


If you ask me, I'd say such a change would actually be an improvement.

but that would mean I would have to re-draw every pixel of many, many tiles (over 100, prob.)! >O that wouldn't only take more than a year, IMO you don't really need those backgrounds


@coob: ah well, the one and only in this pack then:P or the one and only by me:P or the one and only with 2 tilesets:P or the one and only good one:P

Uhhh... no, it wouldn't. It would involve changing the palette used by the image, and possibly some use of a color replace tool, that's all.

I think he's using mspaint.

Actually, all the tiles that would be need to be changed for my idea (minus the Castle 1 Night warp tiles which weren't included in your set anyway) are there in the image I first posted. And even if you're only using MSPaint, you wouldn't need to redraw any pixels or use any color replacing tool. You could've use TilesetPal along with resaving the image without a palette, but I don't want to get into that right now.

Here's what would be my proposed palette as seen through palette events:

[IMG]http://www.jazz2online.com/d3/events.bmp[/IMG]

Or with a few rows rearranged:

[IMG]http://www.jazz2online.com/d3/events2.bmp[/IMG]

And with either of those palettes, theoretically a background such as the following could still be possible:

[IMG]http://www.jazz2online.com/d3/tubelec-bg.gif[/IMG]

You're probably going need a tile that contains the entire palette to make sure everything works. And just so you know, I used the sprite colors from Castle 1 so that the stain-glass windows would still look the same. I hope you have still have a version of your set before you did any color reduction for your convenience. But anyway, you're free to try whatever you want.

I should take a look at the first beta.. however I'm quite certain I already did the colors there... Maybe I'll just have to make castube again and use your palette idea... it looks nice and there will probably be less color reduction... but that would require a lot of work (actually all work)... at least, I don't have to do the medium pillar anymore, you did it;P

the problem is.. I don't know exactly which tiles don't use the wall tile colors.. afaics (as far as I can see) it's just the medium pillar, so in that case it's worth the effort

used programs:

mainly mspaint
palette suite for modifying the palette
psp for loading modifications

All this "Work" can easily be done very quickly, its just replacing a few colors.
psp has a good enough color replacing tool, I suggest you use it.

...So you have PSP yet you choose to use mainly MSPaint. Did you want an extra challenge, or are you unwilling to make a crossover?

well since PSP caused me to have spent a whole day creating a single tile (see the beta's) I decided I'd rather use the pixelperfect ease of Paint. it's just.. PSP doesn't even have all of paint's features and others of them (like the fill tool) work worse when pixelperfecting

Example:
A=black pixel
B=nearly black pixel
C=white pixel

making black pixels white with the fill tool:
some way that tool trashed the tileset


also, PSP eats that much memory that when I have PSP opened with 3 huge images (read: tilesets) and have JCS, WLM and a number of small background tools open at the same time, Jazz runs out of memory! So, I had to close psp to test my tileset and then, about a minute later, had to open it again.. which takes awfully long...

my conclusion:

I used PSP since I don't have any other program that can load palettes into images.

PSP's fill works just like MSPaint's, if you configure it correctly... You probably set "tolerance" to something higher than 0, or "Match Mode" to something else than "RGB Value".

If you need Paint's Pencil tool (used to manipulate individual pixels), just set the size of PSP's Paint Brush to 1. I wouldn't know about any other features Paint has but PSP doesn't...

I also like paint's selecting better.. and why did they make psp's ctrl+v shortcut paste as new image instead of paste as new selection?

anyway, I'm pausing Castube a bit since I'm more busy with the RR League right now, so I'll just write down all changes that need to be made on a list or so.

You get used to pressing Ctrl+E instead. And being able to paste a new image easily comes in handy. Also, you can't go wrong with rectangular selections and Magic Wand, as well as being able to add or subtract from a selection.

I would guess you're using PSP 8 or some higher version. But surely you don't need to have WLM or similar programs running all the time.

Anyway, I can't image working on tilesets anymore without the usefulness of grids, in particular the ability to snap to grids. I could bring up other arguments favoring Paint Shop Pro, but if you prefer more work...

Jerry, you should use GraphicsGale. You can make a 32x32 grid on it as well as a pixel grid, and deal with palettes, but it is more orientated to pixel editing etc.

To be honest, I never figured out how to deal with palettes in GraphicsGale, but TilesetPal and PalleteSuite fill that gap quite nicely if you're have troubles with it as well, Jerry.

well I don't have palette problems at all, for some reason psp just trashed my tileset a few times.. I have no idea how.. I'll make some screens soon

I'll give GraphicsGale a try when I'm back working on the tileset... it sounds useful

@blur I do have to run WLM all the time. how else do people contact me? if WLM is running, I don't get messages for new e-mails too...

Get a real email account so you can use POP3.

I've got one. btw, hotmail is real too..

POP3 sux ++webmail

yeah indeed I agree

anyone willing to vote?:lol:

I'm back here to announce that I feel like working on Castube again after busy times at school are over (= probably next week already)... I'll try out that program later today as I've never tried it... I think I'm going to put the tileset together again from the beginning, so that no color reduction has been used, and I'll try to use the second palette Blur made, as well as his recolours in post #17.

Just tried GraphicsGale and must say that it's just what I've been looking for. Now I only need to make the hard choice bedween Blur's palette event palettes to start rebuilding Castube. =)




EDIT: And now I've also examined both palettes really good, with the conclusion that the Castle tileset actually doesn't use over 100 of its palette's colors... If the tileset extractor was released when I started making castube I could have used the castle palette the way I'm going to use it now ;p Tubelectric has many unused (or duplicate) colors too, though less, but I think I can make an (even) better tileset this time ;p

You might also want not to use 18 tiles just to credit yourself, especially when all the work you have to do is translation and not actually draw something. ;p

In fact, the whole variation of color in blocks you have is completely useless as no one hardly uses them and when they do it's still the most matching color they use than a choice from a rainbow.

Gmail (and IIRC hotmail) can use POP3.