My custom Hyrule tileset. Still a WIP - Ver. 2.0 no .dat file yet

[ffomega]

Since I was recently watching Christopho on his live stream on youtube, I told him I would upload my custom Hyrule tileset, so here it is

UPDATE-3-22-2016: Please refer to the last post for the updated tileset.  Thank you

UPDATE: This image has been uncompressed to get rid of the noise left behind.  As a result it looks much cleaner and of much higher quality.  If you have downloaded this image, PLEASE download it again to update your current version!!



The Tileset's .dat file is also included.  Keep in mind.  Again, it is a WIP

Here is the included data file:

Light World 2.dat

[MetalZelda]

This is a great tileset to begin with, are you going to port all of PZE tiles to Solarus ?

[ffomega]

I wanted to originally, but after being apart of, and watching Christoho's live stream the other day, I will not be porting all of the tiles as he wishes to only implement the ones that look like they fit with A Link to the Past.  Also, as per his request, I will have to recolor all the tiles to match the PAL (or European) version of A Link to the Past, as this is the version he is familiar with, and uses with Solarus.

[Christopho]

No, you can port more tiles, I am sure that it will be useful for people.
And it does not really matter between PAL or NTSC, since it is easy to convert between one and the other (the important thing is that a game does not mix them).

[MetalZelda]

Wait, there are difference between PAL and NTSC in term of palette ?

[ffomega]

yeah and because of my poor eyesight even I did not know this.  Chris pointed out that every color in the palette has a 32 number difference brightness between them.

Also, part of the reason I did not port the entire tileset was because, and it might just be on my side of theings, Solarus takes a long time (up to 30 seconds) to load a map for me.  I have three computers, each of them with a different OS on them for compatibility purposes.  One has Windows 7 Home premium, one has Windows 10 Free upgrade, and the other has WIndows XP SP3.  I have run Solarus on my Windows XP machine as well as the Windows 10 machine.  The Windows 10 machine cuts the load timee down by around 10-15 seconds, but the XP machine loads a bit longer, between 15-25.

I am working with the tileset that I uploaded here, but mine is less compressed than this one (which, if you look closely, some of the tiles have noise in them).  Without the compression, so far that png file is around 300 KB in size.  And in his recent stream he states that Solarus is designed to load maps and even tilesets of virtually any size.  However I noticed that when I used one of his tilesets, load times were instant, no longer than 3-5 seconds.  Loading one of mine brought the load time up significantly, even on small maps using the much bigger tilesets.

So, I tried to minimize the number of tiles as well as the overall file size to help load times.  This resulted in the image forcing it down to a 256 color png with alpha transparencies, which looks kinda terrible.

I will replace the reduced image with a less compressed version so if anyone downloads this image to use in their projects PLEASE be sure to update it.  I will edit the post accordingly to let everyone know it has been changed!

-EDIT- The image has been updated!

[Christopho]

Can you send me your project so that I check the performance, because 15-20 seconds to load a map or tileset is really not normal, even a big one. Even 0.5s would be too long.

[ffomega]

Sure

http://www10.zippyshare.com/v/I6BVo6R5/file.html

It's messy though.  I hope you don't mind xD

[MetalZelda]

I got something similar (but not these high load time) when making my tileset, did your tile's width / heigh exceed 2000 pixels ?

[MetalZelda]

The thing I see when opening your project is that you use a development version of Solarus 1.5 (which can have some issues), and load times are normal in 1.4.5 (got an error 'bomb_bag' is not saved on startup but map was loaded very fast ... far away from the 30 seconds)
Maybe you should try to test with 1.4.5 and post some feedbacks

[Christopho]

Ok, I opened the issue: https://github.com/christopho/solarus/issues/854
Don't hesitate to give more details that can help me reproduce it. Should I just open the tileset to reproduce the performance issue?

[ffomega]

the current dimensions of the custom hyrule tileset are 992 x 1600.

[MetalZelda]

the current dimensions of the custom hyrule tileset are 992 x 1600.

This is strange indeed, are you sure that you don't have a program that is running in the background of your desktop that can take a lot of Hard drive's access time or CPU ?
Because I tested with 1.4, 1.4.5, night build of 1.5 and the opening / loading time are the same (Windows 7 64)

[ffomega]

I have tested this on two different machines, one with much better specs than the other.  the XP machine had Skype running in the background, and both the XP machine as well as the 10 machine had antivirus and Steam running in the background; all at minimum performance (no more than 3% of the CPU per process on either machine, and no active windows open).

Even on the XP machine, with my browser open, using up more than 75% of the CPU (single processor), and at only 2 GB of ram, Solarus ran at moderately good performance.  I feel the issue is in 1.4.5 because 1.5 reduced the load time by a couple seconds, but overall still a low load time.  In the very beginning, keep in mind 90% of the work done has been done from the XP machine, Solarus loaded instantly when I used the PZE tileset, and the dimensions of that tileset were 256 x 11000+

[Christopho]

Just to be sure, is it slow when you open the tileset in the quest editor, or when you run a game with a map that uses the tileset?