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DS development > The village in Children of Mana

#141715 - ChronoDK - Fri Sep 28, 2007 8:20 pm

Hi,

I have been playing Children of Mana, and I wondered how they did those pretty backgrounds in the main village. It's like walking around on a piece of artwork, so I don't think it is tile based. All the scrolling graphics I have done before has been tile based using text background layers. Anyone know which screen mode they are using then? There is some overlapping graphics, but I'm not sure if that is made with sprites or another background layer.

Please, tell me the basics on how to do something like that :)

#141721 - sajiimori - Fri Sep 28, 2007 9:03 pm

You can do tile-based but have every tile be unique. Reusing tiles is just an optimization.

#141731 - ChronoDK - Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:28 pm

Which kind of memory layout would I use then? I assume there wont be enough VRAM to have unique tiles in several different background layers?

#141732 - sajiimori - Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:33 pm

32x24 chars = 768 chars per full-screen BG layer.
8x8 pixels * 0.5 bytes per pixel = 32 bytes per 4-bit char.
charsPerScreen*bytesPerChar = 24k per layer.

You can allocate a 128k bank to BGs and have all unique chars.

#141734 - HyperHacker - Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:41 pm

Or you can have a 256x256 palletized or 16-bit bitmap; the latter in 128K, the former in I don't know how much. (And note that only 256x192 of this is being shown at a time, so if you don't want to scroll it, you can use the last ~32K for data.)
_________________
I'm a PSP hacker now, but I still <3 DS.

#141754 - ChronoDK - Sat Sep 29, 2007 9:54 am

Thanks. Guess I should just look into it them - sounds simple enough.