Anyone else bugged by 0 Sideways door sprites?

[Fox420 19]

It always bothered me since I started using RPG Maker, that there are 0 sideways door sprites in any of the makers. It makes no sense, as doors aren't always just going to be up and down in a room. Another one is why is almost every wall asset square.. with very little rounded edges or hexagonal ones. I've seen some, but it's rare. As well as most roof tiles being completely flat.

[Kayzee 4,032]

Not very many classic SNES JRPGs have sideways door sprites either. There is a reason for this. As well as a reason for why almost every wall asset is square, and at least partly why most roof tiles are flat. Because honestly? It just makes working with tilesets way way less needlessly complicated and fiddly. The more you try and force things that don't neatly fit into the forced perspective most JRPG maps use into a tileset, the more over-complicated it is to actually build maps with them. The whole concept of using tiles starts to break down. That's when many people turn to what they call in the RPG Maker community "parallax mapping", but that has it's own set of problems.

 

And yes, isometric 45 degree tiles are a thing... except not really. Look at this image of isometric 45 degree 'tiles' and see if you can spot the problem. Thing is, those aren't 'tiles' at all by game standards. They are sprites. Tiles are all about being able to quickly draw things by quickly copying memory in linear easy to manage chunks (though when an alpha map is involved it may be a moot point). Drawing maps with little 45 degree sprites like that is a perfectly acceptable way of building maps, but try to fit those isometric 45 degree sprites to an actually tileset? Doable, but makes working with it on a tile by tile level an absolute nightmare. Better off just using sprites.

 

[PhoenixSoul 1,404]

I'm not that bothered by such. True, it would make for some interesting and graphically deeper mapping, and yes, there are plenty of non-square/non-flat roof tiles available, many of them can just simply be found and grabbed on a whim. It still doesn't bother me all that much though that the RTP doesn't really have any.

[Fox420 19]

I use parallaxing, but people shouldn't have to rely on it to get non-square walls or sideways doors. Plus it doesn't really fix the issues.

[Kayzee 4,032]

Tiles are square, so it's always going to be easier to do square tiles, and sideways doors are a matter of projection. ... You know despite what I said before about isometric tiles, there is an exception I can think of and that is Ultima 6:

 

 

For reference this is the whole game's tileset (including sprites) and it's pretty compact... Ultima 6 doesn't even use multiple tile layers (doorways/doors are objects in U6) so it could probably be cut down a little even. Still need to basically draw everything with that projection in mind though. That's the biggest problem.

 

(Also Ultima 6 might still be my favorite RPG, haven't played it in ages though.)

Edited September 21, 2020 by Kayzee