Cheap reflections.

[coyotecraft]

I think this deserves a separate topic about reflections.

Chrono Crisis screenshot by Chains of Fate.

The reflections are a cheap trick. I remember thinking, wow there is a script for that?
But it's done on a sprite sheet. The characters I mean. The walls and junk are probably their own tiles.

I should have called it a Cleaver trick. Doing this any way other than using a script would still take some time. It's kinda obsolete since there are plenty of reflection scripts out there today.

Wouldn't that mean the characters don't line up with the tilesets though? Since they'd be twice as high meaning where the characters feet start wouldn't be in line with the current tile you're stood on, meaning it'd look really awkward under certain circumstances

Originally, I thought the same thing. Which made me figured the reflections were like shadow events. But then I tried recreating it. It actually works better to have the character and reflection on one sheet. Because when everything has a reflection it all lines up.
There is a little trick with the tilesets. The tiles that are reflections aren't passable. Let me explain, the character's reflection is technically the sprite's "feet". And you can't have reflections on top of each other because that would mean the objects are on top of each other. Get it? It's like an illusion. If you walk towards the wall, the sprite character/event will technically stop at wall's reflection but because the character's body is higher than the typical sprite it looks like it stopped at the edge of the wall instead.

No parallel processes or special scripts required. Just a little image editing to create the reflections in the first place.

 

[Ellie]

That's a pretty cool idea actually. I'd seen this done in 2k/3 but never thought about how they did something so seemingly complex. I have seen scripts for it now, for XP/VX/Ace.

 

[Jason]

Yay my quote is in an "article"! :biggrin:

 

[Glitchfinder]

Yes, this can be done with scripts, but the graphical implementation is typically more effective. Especially in situations where you can't afford to waste resources on extra graphics or objects, like when making a game in HTML5. In something like that, every "cheap trick" that can mostly approximate a good effect is well-worth using, since you can't use much in the way of resources without dragging the game to a halt.

In short: this article goes over the better way to deal with this kind of stuff, especially in low-resource environments.