Some practical upscaling of Ace to MV/MZ tiles - Walls

じ☆ve冰风

I already wrote a general tutorial on this whole topic and I know that not everyone is as proficient as me when it comes to working with tiles. Upscaling is a lot of work, but if you do it smart, it gets a lot more doable and unlocks a lot of additional resources you can use in your game.

I would not recommend brainlessly mass-upscaling a whole set, cause, yeah, it is a lot of work (ask me how I know). But using it on a smaller scale is very worth it for everybody using the newer engines.

For this tutorial I will use the FSM tiles, cause as I am writing this I am done with all the RTP Ace tiles and used up everything and don't wanna do the same stuff a second time


So let’s dive in, with the easy, easy case:



You see one of the A4 autotiles from the VX (Ace) FSM set, and what makes it so easy to convert is that most of its elements fit perfectly into a 16x16 grid.
That is so important cause one VX/Ace tile can be made out of 2x2 16x16pieces, while and MV/MZ one can be made out of 3x3 16x16 pieces.
So let me show this to you:



By simply “mapping” a shape like above, we already get pretty close to a functional MV/MZ autotile. Be aware: the mapping always works, but since this moves the locations of the “tiling seams”, it is only this quick and easy when the base tile is made out of 16x16 components.
It often helps to make a quick “tiling test”:



If we map a larger structure, does it still work? Here it does, no additional fixes needed.

For the inner edges, we take the inner 4 24x24 squares of the top and rearrange them as you can see below. Then we simply place the base we did as you can see on the previous arrangement and place it onto it:




Now all that’s left is copying the 4 24x24 corners of the top for the preview image of the autotile and you are done:



right is the default

As you can see, this conversion has a downside: your tiles and stones will look smaller in comparison, rims get thinner etc.But other than that, it is a few minutes to make a cool tile work!

Now, this works for a lot of the VX/Ace Mack Autotiles, which makes things quite easy… but a lot is not all.
And often we will even find us mixing techniques, like here:



As you can see, this wall consists of three parts. The stony rim on the top can be treated like above, so that is simple.
But for the “floor” and the wall we can use two different techniques, meaning that we will solve this problem by dividing it up and conquering all the parts on their own.



As already said, the top can be handled by simply understanding the pattern and doing some copy and paste.

For the wall itself:



Our stones are 32x16 - to tile for MV or MZ, they need to be either larger (48x24) or smaller (24x12). Scaling down is easier, scaling up might be prettier, but let us have a look at both.
Luckily, stones don’t have complex pattern, so we should be fine anyways.
So for the smaller stones, we can simply adjust the height e.g. by scaling down the middle part:



…and then moving down the rest of the pattern:



Rinse and repeat…



… and with cut and paste we get the right width:



As you can see, now we have a perfect 48x48 tile that we can edit - again by copy and paste to get the full wall:



As you can see in the before and after, we have a comparingly small stone size, but then again, we got a completely new wall to our pool of tiles in minutes.

But it works the other direction of course as well, it is just more difficult.



left to right: the tile we edit, middle our tile cut up so the edges of the stones line up with the template, the template

For stones that are rectangular we can usually get away with copying and pasting the structure, since it is not too repetitive or unique.

And we could in fact do that, but then again, we can also use dirty tricks and here I am going to show you one.




As you can see, we can fill those gaps by selecting the structure left and right of the edges (which I do not want to stretch or alter, this also applies to the light line at the top of the stones) and stretch them so they meet in the middle. The result is ugly and grainy, but that is okay.. because we simply open our stone wall in Gimp and select only the insides of the stones, because that is where the texture is an issue:



And it is an issue because it is a noisy mess as it should be, just the wrong grain sizes cause of the resizing.
BUT… we can add noise and solve that!
Filters - Noise - HSV Noise, see which settings look best for your noisy stone wall:




And done, we now have two walls to pick from (or just use both, whatever):



Which leaves us with the only tile that isn’t easy and that I didn’t find a smart and easy way to scale up, a tile that is like the “floor top” - here it is all time consuming careful rework.

First, we take the tile and scale it up to 150% (without interpolation or anything)...




… and then, we zoom in.



While it is a lot of work, we take it one stone at a time, and we have our reference on the side.
Basically it is a like a coloring book. You have the lines, you have the reference, and all you need to do is to smooth out all those gnarly edges and lumps in the pattern.

Sadly, here is no hack, no shortcut. You can do the inside with the noise hack if you wish, but for the pattern itself, in my opinion, there is only careful manual work for a good result.

But let us be real: if that is not your skill level yet, that is okay. You could put any other floor pattern behind the top that we already made and would be good to go.

You should try anyways, sitting down with a pixel program - I like graphicsgale - and try to understand and recreate the correct pattern. It will help you a lot with your skills and understanding how tiles work.

Anyways, back to the upscale.
If we do things like these cobblestones, it helps to mid process cut the tile in half and swap the halves, so we rework the stones from the edges “whole”:




And after a while…



It is done.
Now all that is left is some assembling and we are done:




I am not sure if that is something you guys are interested in, if that is the case, there is a lot more to talk about when it comes to upscaling Ace tiles and I would stick to the Mack tiles as example and explain the different strategies I would use for the different types of tiles.
Let me know what you think!


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