Cosmetic Lighting and Panoramas

[Vasha]

(ugh, third time trying to write this)

so i'm trying to do some cosmetic lighting in rmxp, and i found a tutorial here, but the lighting fox starts off in the middle of the map, and so the lighting isn't where it should be, and there's an ugly seam. help?

also in the cosmetic lighting, the transparencies are weird. when i leave the black nontransparent in my photo editor it stays completely nontransparent in RMXP, and when i make it semitransparent i can see through the black (though it still looks bad), and the white that's supposed to my light is still opaque.

So, I've realized that there are very few good panormas out there. i've been looking, and the around ten that i can find aren't any good. does anyone know where i could find some? this isn't as important as the above problems, but it would still be nice

[Rayen]

It'd help me more if I could see some screenshots, but I think your first issue

but the lighting fox starts off in the middle of the map, and so the lighting isn't where it should be

is probably because your cosmetic lighting image isn't the exact same size as the map you're testing it out on.

[Vasha]

well, it's supposed to be. the ratio was the same as the tutorial was. i'll try to post up some screenshots when i get to my other computer

[Lunarea]

I've always used "Show Picture" command instead of fog for cosmetic lighting. Have you tried that out?

[Vasha]

i tried it, but the picture moves around with the person. unless there's a way to stop that?

[Reives]

For ones that are larger than a screen, fog saves a lot more time. And whatever your problem is should be an easy fix, but there's just no info to debug it atm. Just take a screenshot of the code for it, and post it along with the fog.

[Lunarea]

A screenshot would definitely help.

You can use variables to set a picture to set coordinates via Event X and Event Y variables. 

[Vasha]

Screenshots!

Spoiler: Map with Nontransparent Fog • show

Spoiler: Map with Semi-Transparent Fog • show

Spoiler: Fog Details (in the even-operated fog changer cuz i change it in a cutscene • show

Spoiler: Nontransparent Fog (not sure if the difference will show up) • show

Spoiler: Semitransparent Fog (not sure if the difference will show up) • show

The tutorial uses a 20x15 map, and says that the fog should be 640x480 pixels. My map is 20x23, so I figured out the ratio and it needed to be 640x736. which it is.

[Reives]

The bright light problem is because for some reason, you simply brushed the light spots with white. What you're supposed to do is to erase the light spots, not adding white colour to it. As for the placement of the fog, Is the Zoom 100%? And are you certain that the map is 20x23? It looks like there's a lot of space to the left of that screenshot.

[Rayen]

Do you have a mockup of how you want it to actually look like?

[Vasha]

@reives: whoops, that would do it  gonna have to work around that with paint.NET, cuz i'm not exactly sure how well i'll be able to do it.
@rayen: i think i might... i'll have to check if i saved it on my computer.

[Vasha]

double post!

okay, so in that same map (which is using the tower in tileset) i'm trying to make a door between one door and another in the same map (the map is divided into a main room on the bottom, a room on the top left and a room on the top right), but since this tileset doesn't have an autotile for the ceiling i have to improvise with events. in order for you not to see the player at all as he's walking through the wall/doorway, that part of the wall needs to be made with events (otherwise you'll see the top of his head while he's walking), but the wall made in the event layer is apparently darker than the wall made in the second layer. why is this, and how can i fix it?

EDIT on the lighting: so i just made the white transparent like i was supposed to, and now it looks good (aka, i can actually see myself) but i don't think i can see the light parts in the fog (also, i used the trick that you told someone before, reives, about having the big ball of light two squares beneath your light source. looks nice)

EDIT 2: okay, so apparently the reason for the above edit was because i still had the fog see to 500x d: just put it back to 100x, and i can see stuff, but it's still in the wrong position. screenies soon

EDIT 3:

Spoiler: screenie • show

[Reives]

So you used an event to put a 4th layer of tile in there, right? If it's the same tile, it shouldn't be any different. I'm assuming that if you did that part correctly, the difference may have to do with the autotile mis-selection. It's pretty vague right now though; post a screenshot, it always helps a lot.

[Vasha]

okay, i was sure it was more noticable than this:

Spoiler: noticable? red circle! • show

There are three ways to have the player not show up:
1) move the wall priority up. tried this, and apparently i ran into the same problem of the part of the wall being darker than the rest of it
2) make it a normal wall, and change the character's opacity to 0 when you want him in the wall. this doesn't work, though, cuz he disappears either a bit after he's in the wall or a bit before
3) make the wall not on a regular layer, but as an event. this is what i did, and you can see a tad of discoloration in that part of the wall now. like i said, it was more obvious before, but apparently it's not that bad now, so my friend (i'm making this for a friend's birthday) might not even notice it, but the ocd-person in me wouldn't like leaving it that way

(three edits to the last post, by the way. just in case you didn't see it)

[Reives]

Okay, they're a different colour not because of the tile, but because of the lights. I'm assuming you already have the light events on "Always On Top"; the reason why they are appearing below the tiles is because their event ID is lower than event ID of the wall event tiles.

Do this: Move the light events whose lights touch the wall tile to a corner somewhere and remove their graphics. Then copy+paste/create new light events to put them in the old ones' places (or do it until their event ID > the event ID of the wall tiles). Tadah. c: