Tilesets

The world of Powder is made up of a grid of locations, like a big chess board. The game rendering engine presents the game world to the user by rendering each grid location as a tile, or a set of over-layed tiles. A tile is a 2-dimensional graphical bitmap. There is a tile for each dungeon feature (a wall, floor, pit, lava, etc), a tile for each creature, a tile for each obtainable object, a tile for each creature effect (charmed, asleep, on fire, etc), a tile for each dungeon effect (like smoke clouds, etc), and a tile for each detection modifier (unseen, detected by warning, heard, detected by telepathy, etc).

A single grid location can be rendered by using multiple tiles depending on what objects and effects are in that location. For example, a single grid location could be a floor tile, overlaid with a monster tile, overlaid with an acid cloud.

Similar to the dungeon tiles, the buttons of the interface are stored as 2d graphics bitmap tiles, as is the avatar "paperdoll". Fonts are stored as a set of bitmap graphics of each character in that font.

Most items and monsters in the game are represented by a single item, but a few monsters are represented by 4 tiles in a 2x2 configuration. These monsters occupy all 4 tiles at once.

The look of the game can be changed by selecting different tilesets for the renderer to use to draw the game world with.

Built-in Tile Sets
Powder currently comes with several tilesets built-in: Note: In the credits, the following people are listed under Tileset Artists: Adam Bolt, Akoi Meexx, Andrea Menga, Zak, Kelly Bailey, Markus Maier, Ibson the Grey, Chris Lomaka.

To select a tileset go to the options menu (either at the main menu or in-game), selects Tiles, and select a tileset.

Custom Tilesets
Powder allows an external user-created tileset to be used in addition to the built-in sets. The additional tileset will be taken from BMP files located in a folder called GFX alongside the main executable.

Creating A Custom Tile Set
The easiest way to get started making your own tileset is to download the Powder source package and extract the BMP files in the gfx folder to a gfx folder alongside your Powder executable. These bitmap can then be edited using any BMP editor program. The following files will be used by Powder in the gfx folder: Note: that is not a typo in the font files. The heavy file is used for the light font, and the light file is used for the heavy font.

A note on colors in the graphics: The color black (palette color #0) becomes transparent when tiles are overlaid. The lime-green color (0x00FF00) becomes true black.

Additional color note: The game renders in 15 bit color (probably to be compatible with the GBA/DS). Any higher bit colors (such as 24-bit true-color) are converted down. TIP: For 24 bit color (used by modern computers), 15 bit can be approximated by using RGB values in increments of 8.

WIKI TODO: 24-bit true-color BMP files are not rendered properly. 8-bit palette mode is what all current tileset graphics use. Can use 16-bit palette? Can mix and match palettes among files? Tile sizes of 16x16 and 32x32 are known to work, what about others?