environmental effects

I was curious as to if anyone had found a viable way to make it appear to snow or rain (think original Zelda for the super nintendo), I know that using an NPC one can create the illusion of fog, but wasn't quite sure how to implement something a little more complex.

advice would be appreciated.

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-Joseph
"The Cruelest Lies Are Told in Silence"

simply create a series of sequential png or pict animation frames(raindrops falling, snow falling etc), put it all together in a animation file and place it in a layer above the player level, in the map editor, your effect will animate.

advice use reasonably small stamps 32x32-64x64, and try to keep the number of frames to a minimum for optimization/speed's sake.

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What kind of performance hit would I take if I wanted to make an entire world map appear to snow? I'm messing with a 4000x4000 pixel map with approx. 125 Tiles (32x32). It seems like I'd incur a severe performance hit if I applied it to all the tiles. Am I just somewhat right or totally way off?

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-Joseph
"The Cruelest Lies Are Told in Silence"

using 32x32 tiles, i believe that you'd all but kill your game.
Is this 4000x4000 being used as a world map?
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When you get to sizes of 256x256 you still end up with 256 tiles to cover that area.
512x512 its about 49 tiles.

If CGE manages to comfortably handle the 512x512 images then you're definitely in the clear...
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else you might want to reconsider using the NPC that follows the player around.

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As you suspected yes the large JPG is being used for a world map. Perhaps an NPC would be a better way to go since I could just make it "invisible" and make the animation large enough that it would cover the screen. Since I'd only be moving a lot of grey pixels around that would seem to be cheaper in terms of performance.

Some times I wonder what sort of RPG's Beenox played around with concept wise; sometimes having the source of inspiration is useful in gauging the expectations. Ah well. Thanks much.

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-Joseph
"The Cruelest Lies Are Told in Silence"

when it comes to building games etc...

I just keep in mind that for the most part no one can tell what i did to achieve it, and for the most part if they do know no one will care.

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(This message has been edited by ellrx (edited 02-07-2003).)