what size should i make sprites/tiles for an rpg? i went to a website that praised 16x16, but thats too small imho.

and how do you animate in gimp?

For a resolution of 640x480 you can use 32x32 ( or multiples for greater resolutions ).

Simple animation in GIMP:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/

More advanced animation in GIMP:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Advanced_Animations/

And I think 32x32 would be a fair enough size for it.

ok. thanx mucho <3 i was gonna settle for 24x24, but that was too small too

Well, on your screen (which is of what size?) how many do you expect to see at the same time?
Draw a basic figure in your favorite drawing program, stencil it a couple hundred times in a grid and see if the size looks good. Consider that in your game the used screen resolution might be different then the default desktop settings, so adjust as needed.
I would advise to use a multiple of 16 for its dimensions, or even better: a power of 2.

ok. ill figure it out. can someone help me get the link to a free mappy download? all i get is the french version of mapquest XD

I use 16x16 tiles sometimes, and run fullscreen at 320x240. If the user decides they want 640x480 windowed or full, I simply draw everything which would result in lots of empty space, and right at the end I do a BLIT operation from the left top corner to fill the screen so that the image is expanded.

In reverse (which looks better), if you draw 32x32 pixel tiles on a 640x480 resolution and the user wants 320x240 windowed, you simply draw it offscreen somewhere and then BLIT it at half-resolution to the new window.

For maximum power it's good to do the following:

- Draw the tiles as best as you can, as large resolution as you wish. Scale them down (if applicable) to fit the tilemap of any arbitrary 4:3 or widescreen resolution using a mathematical proportion to the height of the screen so that you don't get distortion of aspect ratio.

- Draw textures to be mapped to 3D polygons as high as you can, because it's often polygons are drawn large and close and look ugly if they have low resolution textures. Scale them down if there isn't enough VRAM by allowing the user to do so.

- Bitmapped fonts work on all machines easily, and it's cool if you have width settings for each character that are pre-calculated when the game loads and you rasterize the font at a high resolution.

Basically, you can always scale down but scaling up looks ugly. A good algorithm to determine the scale factor of a square object ensuring it remains square even on widescreen formats is to find out which length on the screen is smaller and go from that. For standard resolutions (4:3 AND widesceen) it will always be the height of the screen. Using the diagonal length works, but can be a little tricky depending on your game (2D/3D).

For placing things in the GUI I tend to favor the "Pixels from the edge of the screen" approach. For example, typically a health bar is placed a few pixels from the top and left of the screen which is a simple addition. A message box for an RPG tends to be aligned pixels from the bottom of the screen and center-fit where chat boxes for MMORPGs tend to be aligned a few pixels from the left and bottom. As the resolution gets bigger, it becomes harder to see the GUI so a simple 1x/2x variation will work without distorting things too much.

If you can have a windowed mode that the user can drag around to change it's size, it's great to jiggle the mouse around and see if the GUI adjusts itself to fit correctly in scale and position for testing purposes. If not, try using a fullscreen or large mode where the size of the screen is set by the position of the mouse for testing purposes.

Keep in mind Sayu's sprite graphic in my demo is 16 by 16 pixels, but she's drawn in a 3D environment as a point sprite and has a slightly blurry but recognizable look because she's scaled upwards.

This post has been edited by WolfCoder: 3 Oct, 2008 - 11:36 AM

im kinda new to this. its a side project im working on very slowly. im working on which size i should practice drawing stuff in, so thats why im asking. next is to figure out how to steal make music for my game

Microsoft has a free DirectMusic Producer thingy. It sequences standard MIDI but the controls are more complicated than a space shuttle because it lets you use AI to compose music on-the-fly or make your own instruments with a huge window with lots of controls and wave file importing in ranges. I'd say learn how to use it though, since you can use your own instrument sounds since MIDIs suck and export the whole music file as a WAV and make an MP3 out of it since DirectMusic Producer can work with high-quality sound files and it records keyboards into tracks.

It's basically like Photoshop only for music. It looks like software from the 90s but it really rocks and is free as long as you have a valid copy of Windows. Just go to microsoft.com and search it up (DirectMusic Producer). There isn't anything you can't to with it in terms of music, but finding good instrument wave files to replace the MIDI crap can be hard sometimes. Oh yeah, it even does virtual 3D instrument placing (and I think somewhere it will actually do full surround sound information).

Loving old-school game music, I ripped guitar sounds out of the SNES and sounds out of the SEGA Genesis and made a DLS out of them in there along with a classic 8-bit DLS. Good stuff there, but if you really wanted to go all out it will work if you actually recorded 44-khz 16-bit wave files for EVERY NOTE on an instrument and made a DLS out of it. It's easier and platform-independent to make an OGG or MP3 out of the WAV it spits out instead of trying to figure out how to load a MIDI and apply a DLS in a game using DirectMusic. Audacity can convert WAV files into MP3/OGG and I think it works with FLACs too... Not sure.

On a side note, I love how Microsoft reused the GUI and installer from versions obviously from the 90s hehe, I just put in a MIDI file as a segment and it sounds so bad. I really need to dig out my old instrument waves. I can't believe I used to use MIDI files as an acceptable form of music for my game, but now it's all cool to use real instrument sounds and MP3s/OGGs since we can fit so much in a game now.

Linkies^^
DirectMusic Producer
Audacity
LAME MP3 encoder for Audacity for Windows

This post has been edited by WolfCoder: 6 Oct, 2008 - 10:41 AM

you are my hero <3