This one demonstrates (briefly) moving water (of sorts), a transition effect (still in the works), and area titles corresponding to a select few warp points. I had only a few selected simply because no one really wants to be bombarded with messages when you already know where you are. These messages are supposed to be attached to the areas where you'll first enter the area, or when the reminder is a little more important.

Discuss (preferably the transition effect).

Ooooh awesome! I like it so far. I wonder if you could make the water move faster, though? Like 22x faster?

I always had trouble with area names in many of my RPGs that didn't have a world map before, because it was quite hard with my map engines sometimes to tell if I actually just moved to another map in the same area or if I completly moved to a new one.

I originally decided against making the water too fast, but it can be sped up another 2 or 4 times. The current scroll ratio is once for every 8 game cycles, so that's not out of the question. (At least, I assume that's supposed to be 2x, not 22x. That would be ridiculously fast)

On the whole map names thing, the area names are in no way bound to the maps. They're actually bound to the warp point used to take the character to another place, be it another map, or another place on the map. You just need to ... *snicker*... start thinking with portals!

This looks amazing!
I like the transition and the water.

Yay water!  Looks really cool!

I'm curious about the movement, I notice you always are in the exact center of the path, do you move in increments?

Is it possible to walk faster than that?

Personally, I would say not higher than 2.5-3 tiles a second, because in all old RPGs, that's the fastest you could walk. Plus, given the smaller resolution on a calc and the tiles sizes, moving too fast would cause the grayscale to blur too much and you would also accidentally run into traps, doors, entrances, exits or even boss fights because you don't have time to react and stop moving.

I'm making the assumption that you're viewing the page using Firefox, or maybe Opera. IE and Google chrome will not show the animated .gif file at any framerate higher than 10fps (the ones attached are always shot at around 30fps).

If you *are* viewing it and still aren't satisfied with the speed, I'm not sure what to say. It isn't possible to make the game run any faster than it is, and will in most cases actually run slower on the real calc due to grayscale considerations.

The mode dedicated for "airship" is faster simply because the mapper moves two pixels at a time and doesn't bother drawing the one in between. I will not have this for normal walking speed, since that just looks way too fast.

The next post I make will be a small screen shot of a few additional effects I threw in. I cheat in the vid and use the "airship mode" to enter places I'm not supposed to enter from ground-level. You know, the mode used for debugging.

EDIT: Image attached. Shows that the water edge tiles are also animated. If you look closely, the clouds tile in the higher floors of the Arcanian Ruins are animated, and the warp tile as well. The stars in the Celestial Sphere are also "animated", and are not a side effect of the grayscale, though the effect was achieved through layer swapping, which was achievable only because there is grayscale.