The VG Resource

A game series as popular as this, and we're severely lacking in the tileset department? Tsk tsk, TSR!

For clarity's sake, I am referring to the first game in the series, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue team. The game has some excellent tilework, and it would be a fantastic reference for anyone designing a roguelike tileset. Not to mention, I imagine all of the tiles would be super-easy to rip! You'd just have to boot up a ROM, choose an area, and rip all the tiles directly from screenshots. There are only a small number of tiles in each tileset, too, so I imagine the whole process wouldn't take long.

If anyone is interested in ripping these but hasn't played the game, this is an example of the largest the tilesets get.

I swear I love to torture myself by adding more to my workload, but I'll accept this. I'll check everything out later today.

Good luck! You'll need it, lol.

Also I'd like to put it out there that the water tiles are always animated, but often no one bothers with that. I'd love to see that Mt. Thunder tileset be actually complete.

Oh yeah, thanks a lot for taking this request up, Shade! I'm positive a lot of people will get a lot of usage out of these tiles. The animated water tiles would be great, too, because they're nicely animated for something so simple. Anyways, best of luck.

I'm curious if there's any progress to report on this?

I also have some need for these tiles

However, MJ's comment...
DEAR LORD, IS IT TRUE!

Ripping those tiles isn't easy, and I know for fact that many, if not all of those very few rips are quite incomplete...
Forget the water animations, the game seems to be set-up for auto-mapping, in the tiles department. (but, thanks to a certain I.Q. moves called super-mobile, I suppose that is kinda necessary...if the game's rougle-like set-up doesn't already!)

So, is Shade presently/still working on these?

I actually have been working on some on and off with those, because there's a programming project I wish to contribute to, but I must say it is tedious and frustrating. I'm starting to think I should just rip the mini-tiles, or whatever those 8x8 chunks that the tiles are made from, and painstakingly assemble each tile, one by one...
That isn't exactly fun or practical, though... (especially with the animated tiles!)

So, what is the status?

Seeing as I'm already working on them, I could take-over if no one else is doing this, but it would be a WHILE, to say the least, before I have anything slightly use-able... I also cannot 100% guarantee quality.

I have one other idea, but it's a longshot...
I think someone may already have the tiles...
or they have a few, anyways...
I'll look into that.

bedtime for me, now, though.

well, tried my little theory...

good news and bad news

Good news is I've got some tiles.
Bad news is not entirely what I was expecting.

When google-searching for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon screenshots, maps, tiles, etc... one night I happened upon a little project called Pokemon Mystery Universe, or... "PMU". I also noticed the client source repo had a bunch of .tile files, which I wasn't sure how to open. Anyways, this predates me finding this thread, and the creation of the flash embedded assets PWN'er (which doesn't explicitly require .swf files to be processed) by about a month, if I were to guess... So, I downloaded a .tile file and popped into into notepad earlier. from what I can tell, this is a custom binary format, with png data embedded within. Anyways, I downloaded all the .tile files and processed them. I'm guessing all the possible variants of the dungeon tiles are present.

Which brings me to the problems:
1 - these aren't 24x, they're 32x
2 - each image file is a single tile, NO SHEETS!
3 - lots of what appear to be blank ones (totally transparent)
4 - not sure if ripped or custom, but in either case, they won't pass-off for real PMD tiles
5 - thousands of tiles per .tile file
6 - given these were batch-exported, nothing to easily sort the tiles (like file names or linkages/refs of any kind)
7 - I can't tell if the liquid animations are present, but a quick skim-through suggests they're not

So, what does everything else think?
I was thinking of just submitting PMU as its own game and whatnot.
But this still doesn't solve the PMD tile issue, sadly...ripping from the rom still seems necessary

That is all!

This is a project that I make small progress on fairly often. It's relatively high priority on my to-do. I still plan on completing it when I can, but I won't stop someone else from giving it a shot if they feel they can get it done faster.

(09-10-2015, 12:48 PM)Shade Wrote: [ -> ]This is a project that I make small progress on fairly often. It's relatively high priority on my to-do. I still plan on completing it when I can, but I won't stop someone else from giving it a shot if they feel they can get it done faster.

what methods are you using for the ripping?
i've been using the map viewer
and i wouldn't say i can do it faster...

[attached] is some of my work

i've noticed my tiles have slight color differences from previous rips , which have to be corrected with hsl transforms...

Anyways, what's the most solid method you've got?
I'm not sure if mine is perfect, I'm pretty sure it's terribly flawed, actually!
And what are the ideal programs / emu / settings?
I've been using purely VBA

I've been using the built in Tile Viewer for VBA. It's more thorough than using the Map Viewer and it's pretty simple, it just takes some assembling and time.

(09-10-2015, 09:21 PM)Shade Wrote: [ -> ]I've been using the built in Tile Viewer for VBA. It's more thorough than using the Map Viewer and it's pretty simple, it just takes some assembling and time.

ok then
yes, some time indeed
but what you suggest makes sense
I've been using the map viewer, but i think i will just go ahead and use tile viewer from now on.
Thanks!

And what of the colors?
I think I have color set to "real colors" or whatever...Think I tried "gameboy colors" , or whatever it was called, and noticed no difference (although it would be somewhat difficult to observe...).

All I really have left to ask is what tileset(s) are you working on?
I presently am working on anything I have been able to unlock, on and off.
Which is every main dungeon before lapiz cave (i am avoiding that till i'm good and leveled, don't feel like cheating any more than bogus wondermail codes, and i firmly believe in grinding versus potentially dying upon first encounter with a boss or something)

I'm not going to take this over unless you quit, so how about we just work together?