Cave Entrances

[Spoo]

Okay, I'm a tad stuck on what to do here. You know that the mountains tileset comes with the cave crack entrance thing, right? Well, that'd work just fine for a northern entrance, but I'm wanting a southern entrance that's more than just the usual dent in the cliff wall. I want something good looking that is fairly obviously an entrance to a cave. Any suggestions?

 

[Unka Josh]

That's pretty tricky-- the tilesets are mock 3D, so there really isn't a good way to do that.

I guess the best solution would be to have a path leading to the entrance, or else use some miscellaneous rocks, pebbles, and/or plants to indicate where the entrance is.

 

[Venetia]

Eh, that's the way a lot of RM'ers do it and it's crummy mapping.

First, why is there a path in a seldom-used cave?
Second, --have you ever seen a doorway? People typically don't put things near doorways or portals. And stuff doesn't regularly fall there naturally, considering water/wind movement pushing things around. Stuff generally clutters up around corners.
Third ...why do I always see plants growing in RM caves? There's no light o.O

You can do the following for a more interesting route:

- For portals leading outside, have a door-shaped swath of light beaming on the floor. That says to the player, "hey, there's a hole makin' that light".

- What I do, besides the above, is grab the cave portal for north exits/entrances, and then using only the hole-shape of it--make a hole in the darkness leading away from the map, showing the outline of the portal. It grabs the attention right away, and looks more like a believable exit. It also gives your cave a less "boxed-in" feel to it.

- if you suck at editing graphics, instead of just making a little single-tile indentation/notch or a path (again, why would there be a path in a seldom used cave, anyway?), add outcroppings of wall on either side of the exit. Caves don't typically just get holes worn into flat surfaces, the portals have a belled opening or "maw" shape to it. So placing outcroppings on either side will tell the player that this is actually a hole, an accessible area, instead of just a silly little indentation.

example:

_

    __     __ 

___|  |   |  |_____    instead of:    _____     _______

      |___|                                |___|

        ^ Door                               ^ Door

Hope that helps

 

[Spoo]

The light idea would be fine if I was wanting an exit to the outside. Unfortunately, I'm trying to make an entrance to a cave, and light coming out of a dark, abandoned cavern would be highly illogical.


I looked around a bit and found that if I edited the indentation on the southern wall from the cave tilesets to make it fit into my mountains tileset, it might look pretty good. I'm going to experiment with it a bit and maybe post my results.