So the last thing I have to do is come up with a monster interface. I would like to do something like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy where you randomly run into enemies on the map, and then the screen switches to battle mode.

Dragon Warrior 1 keeps the map in the background but just opens a small square window in the middle with the metal slime or whatever.

I only need two options, fight or run. Winning will depend on current stats and strength of the monster.

I am open to suggestions about how to do this the simplest way possible. My first guess is to load an entire new nametable for each monster I create, then turn off graphics, load the nametable, and turn back on. Then I could just write in the nametable A = fight, B = run, and poll the pad.

Anybody have other suggestions or ideas? Simpler is better.

-Pulper

The way Dragon Warrior did it is nice if you don't have a whole lot of stuff to put on the screen (which sounds like the case). Just needs a good looking border. Maybe just a tiny bit harder to do, since blanking the screen in that case would look kinda dumb. I think Dragon Warrior did a kind of circular-wipe (do a row one frame, then a column, etc.). Not hard to do, but maybe tricky to set up (the PPU can do the 'auto-inc vram addy by 32 or 1', which would help a great deal). Looks cool though.

Either way is fine though, and I'm sure graphics artists would appreciate a black background so they don't have to worry about the 'overworld' palette.

So you think The enemies in Dragon warrior were all separate nametables? I was thinking maybe they were a whole bunch of sprites put together.

One question: You can't use your sprite pallette for extra colors on a nametable can you? My nametable pallette just has greens browns and grays, but my sprite pallete has red and orange and stuff.

-Pulper

If you draw your maps with only three palettes, you can use the fourth for battle whenever you need it. Or you could draw things out of sprites but always keep them synchronized to the map scrolling; Super Mario Bros. does this with Fire Flower powerups.

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My English is better than your Geberquen.

They could've been background with sprites overlayed, I'm not sure. That's an easy way to get more colors, just drawing any extra colored pixels as sprites.

Always loved the Dragon Warrior interface, never liked the Final Fantasy interface much (though did like the earlier FF games).

You could always be lazy and do it like Hydlide / Ys -- just bashing into monsters. ;)

-- jdc

The monsters in DW1 are composed entirely out of sprites. And they're pretty cleverly designed in order to use as few tiles as possible--for example, the Slime consists of just three 8x8 tiles in CHR ROM. Its right and left halves are the same two tiles just flipped horizontally, and the highlight on one side of its body is a separate tile.

The monsters in DW2, DW3 and DW4 are drawn mainly on the background, but they use sprites for some details (eyes, highlights, etc.) in order to exceed the limit of 3 colors per 16x16 block. Notice that large monsters "break up" when they flash when taking damage--the flashing of the BG and sprite portions of the monster isn't quite in sync.

To have a monster on a blank screen is a bad idea, put a little nice ground like DW1 is a nice idea, so the player dont "forget" what he was doing beafore battle scince it see a part of the field. DW1 uses CHR-ROM, but this will be better with CHR-RAM, you have just to reserve a portion of the pattern table for the battleground, so when a battle occurs you can write the tiles of the ground choosen (ex. grass, forest, cave, etc...) then write it to the name table the way that you want, but without blanking the screen.
I don't like when there are only the monsters on the screen, like DW234 and Earthbound. FF is cool beacause you also see your characters.
Otherwise you can also just show monsters on fieldscreen like Chronicles of Rydia War must be cool.

Bregalad, Ent from the woods of Fangorn

Cool, thanks for your input, but man you must've been tossed last night, hehehe!

-Pulper

Nah, I'm just living in europe -> GMT+1 and not in USA -> GMT-5 (or something like that)

Long live to Chrono Trigger !

Ah OK, I had just put together the 1:00 AM posting with a couple misspellings and assumed you had even more merlot than I did last night. ;-)

-Pulper

Oh, you're right that's horrible.
"the player DOESN'T forget what he was doing BEFORE battle scince HE'S SEEING a part of the..."

Long live to Chrono Trigger !