Can Flare have an entity / character sprite be scaled up / be rendered 4 times as large?

[WithinAmnesia]

Can Flare have an entity / character sprite be scaled up / be rendered 4 times as large and or can a character take up ~'4 tiles'? Kind of like how Baldur's Gate / Runescape / WoW have big sized enemies that take up more floor space tiles / bigger sprite circle / bigger shadow (Azuregos https://imgur.com/DLSarif + https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/tbead/i_felt_bad_for_saying_stuff_like_that_to_azuregos/ ). From: #880 (comment)

[dorkster]

Not at runtime, but there's nothing stopping you from making sprites that big.

The problem is that the collisions and pathfinding are currently restricted to being one tile per entity. This has been an issue for a long while, but it just hasn't been a priority to tackle since all of flare-game's enemies are 1x1 sized.

[dorkster]

If you want to scale up the entities (player/npcs/enemies), you're going to want to scale up all the map tiles as well. Otherwise, all the entities will be giants next to the existing map tiles. If you scale everything up, the relative sizes stay the same. A tile is a tile. You would just be making the tiles bigger. If you look at mods/fantasycore/engine/tileset_config.txt, you'll see that the tile size we use is 64x32. So 4x of that would be 256x128. That would be what you are targeting.

In short, the no changes to pathfinding would be necessary and is really unrelated to your original question. You also wouldn't need to change the hazards' hit radius, which use tiles as their unit of measurement.

[WithinAmnesia]

Okay so with 256x128 scale tiles, Pathfinding would not need to be changed, the entities can be scaled up x 4 and work, the radious would not need to be changed as well?

If this is true I should start by making 256x128 (x 4 enlarged tilesets) and make a 256 x 128 scale Flare map in Tiled.exe and test out the bigger tiles?

Also how do I x 4 enlarge the entities and spell / ability animations?

[WithinAmnesia]

Okay I got a test 256 x 128 Tileset / 1000 x 1000 Map working but I am not sure how to scale up the character entity by x 4 to match (nor how to x 4 enlarge the npc and enemy entities and spell / ability animations). Is there a process of going to the character / entity art and enlarging by x 4 and doing the same process of implementing x 4 enlarged art assets with the Flare engine as with the icons and tileset / 256 x 128 tile map to match the same scale overall for all art assets / components?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/872743295003000852/931828402300780605/256x128_Tilesets_Work.png
Also I wonder why is the minimap is gone?

[dorkster]

Before moving on to entities, you should make sure you update the tileset definition if you haven't already. For the dungeon set, this is in mods/fantasycore/tilesetdefs/tileset_dungeon.txt. Should just be a matter of multiplying that relevant values by 4. Here's what parts of the the tile and animation properties that you'd need to change:

tile=265,800,0,128,64,32,32
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
animation=265;800,0,66ms;334,128,66ms;462,128,66ms;590,128,66ms;
              ^^^^^      ^^^^^^^      ^^^^^^^      ^^^^^^^

The process should be similar for the character/entity art, except instead of a tileset definition you will edit the animation files. Most of the animation definitions are in mods/fantasycore/animations, but there are also some in mods/empyrean_campaign/animations as well. Again, here's an example of the values you'd need to multiply by 4:

frame=0,0,68,249,27,33,8,39
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Also I wonder why is the minimap is gone?

Perhaps you hit the 'M' key by accident? There was actually bug with the dev console where this shortcut wasn't blocked, so the minimap would change modes whenever the M key was typed into the command box. You can also edit the minimap setting on the Interface page of the config menu. Possible values are: Hidden, Visible, and Visible (2x). I may make it to that the M key only cycles the visible modes to prevent people from accidentally hiding it.

[WithinAmnesia]

Thank you for sharing, the tilesetdef was changed like above to get the map to not crash, small tile art with small tileset_defs on big tiles ~'works' / has lots of black in-between the tiles and does not crash (but looks super buggy); although big tile art with small tileset_defs on big tiles do not even run and just crash / boot to game start area XD. I guessed what numbers need to be changed on the tileset def although now I know / better understand what should be changed to scale up. I did not test tileset / map art animations and I am glad to learn what should be done with scaling up tileset / map animations :-).

I will start enlarging the default avatar animations; lots of lines :-P.

The minimap is back on a new start up, it looks like yeah the dev console where exec intermap=maps/256x128_test0+.txt ; two "M" key presses so it will cycle and potentially with any more "M" presses throw the minimap all over the place XD.

[WithinAmnesia]

Yes. Yet only on a 64-bit executable; I hope: #885 (comment) . Yet once a Windows 64-bit executable is available there will need to be a stress test to see if it will work with also enlarged x 4 menus, maps, entities and other art assets.