PVGames Resource Pack Tips and Tricks

Does anyone have any way, or examples, on how to make a cave entrance? I can't come up with anything that would look reasonably okay. I'm missing Dungeons pack (RPG maker website wouldn't accept card for 2 months, even though I bought earlier stuff with it :F), and there's nothing in T&C that would help

Even the Dungeons pack is not great for caves tbh, its more a building structured type of pack. I believe @Jesse - PVGames said he has plans for a caverns pack at some stage.

Yep, caves are next on the list! I wanted them to have their own pack because caves are usually very important and I wanted to make sure I could give them the focus they deserve.

Can't wait. Your packs are the best!

Hi guys heres a quick video tutorial on how I map PV asset's with Yanfly's doodads.

@padr81 Since you are going with the Doodads method, the movement restriction aspect is easily the most tedious part. However going with the parallax mapping is also annoying for those two tile-high bits and bobs. I'm guessing that we could use a plugin involving a common event that displays our coordinates unless someone has something less time-consuming.

I use QuasiMovements because it allows collision maps. All you have to do is get a screenshot of your map, go to GIMP, make a new layer, paint all the impassable areas as red, delete the screenshot layer and export the collision map. Combine it with the pixel movement and you get a totally new experience.



Quxios recently released a new update to QuasiMovments called QMovements. He's going for a more modular plugin so the collision map aspect hasn't been released yet but you can use QuasiMovements in the meantime.

There's also the QMap plugin which is an app that allows you to map. Similar to Doodad's but it has the ability to support anchor points, which help a lot with the diagonal and bigger objects so they won't go over the player, and the ability to make images transparent when the player steps behind them.

Do you guys think it's possible to make an isometric game using PVGames resources? RPG Maker is geared towards a top down perspective and these packs reflect that. However there's also some resources in the packs that may allow for an isometric perspective like in the original Fallout or Arcanum. Of course it comes with its hurdles but now I think there's a decent amount of plugins that may allow for a decent isometric game especially plugins that allow transparency.

I was doing some light testing seeing on how an isometric perspective would look like using these graphics. Here's some testing that I did with the editor.



Left is the default top down perspective and the other two are some different perspectives.

What do you guys think? Do you think the isometric perspective looks decent or is something off? Would it need any tweaking?

Can't really put the finger on, but the isometric still looks a bit off, seems it's not full ISO. I think the "iso" bits in the resources are more for variety and give other shapes to buildings than the blocky squarey ones.

Niten Ichi Ryu ios correct - these are not proper isometric angles so they won't really work like that. The angled stuff was mostly meant to enhance the otherwise orthographic perspective.

I see. Yeah, playtesting it and something looked off about the angles. I'd figured it was worth asking about it :)

Forgive me for asking if it's already been brought up...

But as I've finally gotten the Wild Steam and DOA packs for VX Ace today, I was wondering if the PV Packs licensing allows for the use in VX Ace.

Also, does anyone know an easy way to make new hair for the figures? I'm working on a more modern/futuristic game and I'm needing spikey hair styles. Think Tina Turner, Elvira, Billy Idol in the 80s...

You can use the packs in VXAce if you like, of course :)

As for hair, that can be a lot trickier depending on what your intention is. If you mean to edit it for all spritesheets, faces etc, that is a lot of work you are looking at! I assume you mean for the figures in the Wild Steam/DoA packs and not the newer sets.

Yeah, I only have Wild Steam and DOA so far so I haven't had the chance to mess with the character templates in the new ones, yet.
I managed to make a spiky hair but it did take a long time. I need to update my brushes in photoshop as the one hair/grass brush is a bit cumbersome and I had to keep rotating and flipping.
Will post a pic of the character soon to get opinions.

And thanks for the info. Will definitely be getting one of the new ones for the child templates.

Now I have another question...
I've been using the High Fantasy and Mythos character sheets in my work, and they have 12 frames with both walking and standing on one sheet.
And the Steam/DOA packs have the standing and walking on separate sheets.
I copied and pasted to get one sheet for the spiky girl but it was complicated to get her lined up properly to avoid jerky movements.
Should I ditch the one-sheet approach and work with the two-sheets intsead?

I'll have to look and see which scripts I'm using.

Mix two hairstyles! I do it all the time. Even male and female can be mixed together with a bit of adjustment in GIMP.



Looks a bit off when zoomed in, but all in all it will get the job done :)

(The bust figure is the only problem...but when there is a will, there is a way ;) )

Looks great, Mardin! Love her!
What pack is the shirt from, btw?

Edit:
Here's my result:

Somewhat off-topic but also somewhat related - I am in the process of moving half-way across the country. As such, my usual work station is in disarray and my ability to do certain kinds of work hindered for the next few weeks.

However, this has forced me to basically focus on just preparing tons of clothing items, hair styles, etc for character templates (all of which will work in the character maker software of course, and fit with all the other stuff in the newer packs). Once I am settled and my work station is in order, I will be able to put together a freebies pack pretty quickly with a bunch of items for both genders, and the next several packs that have character items will be made a bit quicker due to me having already produced a significant quantity of the character stuff (would just need to work on tiles and what not for the packs).

@Leonardo Myst - Just to be clear, so that you are not disappointed if/when you get one of the newer packs, there are no child templates. There are a handful of pre-made child characters, but no parts/pieces to make children. The parts and pieces are only for adult male and female characters.

Thanks, Jesse. I'm sure a bit of Photoshop could probably alter them and it's possible I could find other useful items in there.

BTW... I finally got around to try the demo to check out the scripts and I had a problem.

On the exterior scene the player character wouldn't move. As if there was no passability around her.
I tried a different starting position and had the same result.
The interiors worked fine except they wouldn't go up the stairs.

I may wish to use the sprite scripts since the extra frames and diagonal movement will be nice.
I just need to test them in my project and see if there's any conflicts.

And looking forward to the packs. Good luck on the move.

Edit:
I tried importing the scripts into my current project but had an error when I got to the 'Frames' one.
I think because my npcs and animations were using the smaller sheets.
And no matter what I did, I couldn't reconcile it and use the higher frame character sheets.

So, instead, I started a new project and imported my maps into it, and then added the scripts one at a time.
It's working a bit better as I only had two maps finished and I'm just having to replace npcs with fillers and rework my animations for 12 frames instead of 3.
Turns out I needed to replace the NPCs and my animations to work with the new scripts.

However...
There's two things I must ask about:

1. My NPCs are flickering when idle. I'm using the Examples as my stand-ins currently.
I have one set to the following, as an example:
Walking Animation, Custom, 2:4xslower, 5:Highest, Action Button
-custom move: Wait 200, move random, move random, wait 120, move random, wait 80, move random, move random, wait 120, move random, wait 120, move random, move random, wait 400. Repeat action, Skip if cannot move.

They move fine, but during the wait periods they'll flicker a moving frame.

The player actor idles fine. And I tried doing just 'move random, without the waits, but it makes them look spastic.
Any suggestions?

2. I'm using Example 2 as my player actor as I'm working on converting my maps and I'm using almost all parallax. With a fixed bottom layer and a fixed top layer.
I have some lightposts on my first map with the top portions on the upper layer so that characters can go behind the posts.
The characters from the Mythos pack worked fine with the set up.
But it looks like the sprites from DOA and Steam are a bit larger than the Mythos ones, with the tops of the heads falling under my overlays and the bottom of their feet popping out under the overlays when they're behind them, as well.
I can't adjust the overlay in either direction.
Has anyone worked out a solution to this?

@Jesse - PVGames Looking forward to some more clothes and what not. Clothes and hairstyles are what we need most of all, imo.

An update on mine...

I ended up ditching the upgrade to my project to accommodate the larger sheets. Instead, I've gone back to my original project's format and will be editing the larger sheets down to Mythos style after character creation.

I had problems with my overlays, npc's glitching, having to resize my animations to fit the background and animations either not working or going too slow with the new scripts.
I'm sure there's a way to fix all of that... but as I'm returning to RPGMaker after a long hiatus and learning to parallax, it was just too much more for me to take in right now.

What I did end up taking from the Wild Steam and DOA, however, is still really beneficial.

Of course, the biggest asset is the character templates and accessories.
I have Daz3D and was going to use it prior to getting Wild Steam, but the biggest problem I had with Daz is that hair and clothing are incredibly expensive. And the alternative of copying hair from photographs just didn't sit well with me.
Not to mention, it would take forever to make sprites using Daz and it would really only be good for portraits.

So thank you sooo very much for the character templates!
It may not be everything I need but it's a huge step, as I only need to alter accessories and resize a bit.

I also adopted the YEA Ace Core Engine for full screen support (OMG! What an improvement!) and the Diagonal Movement script.
I'm not really using the diagonal spritesheets, but I've been trying (and failing) to find a way to remove the Shaz Mouse Script from my project and had a conflict where the MOG Menu Cursor script wouldn't run without it. The Diagonal Movement script disables the Mouse script without affecting the Menu Cursor script. Hallelujah!!!
So, thank you again, for inadvertently solving a problem I was having.