Starting a fighting game

[na_th_an]

1. by placeholder graphics what do you mean just draw something and put it in their?
2. What size do you recomand? What size is street fighter guys? Oh and I'm not making street fighter, or anything close to it. Mine will probably have charecters who look like shinobis and other ninja charecters. But the general idea of how it was set up is what I want to acomplish
3. Wizardlife I suppose will help me in this subject but can you explain what mapping gfx is?
4. What in the world is a rendering routine? You need something to render when working with sprites? Please give me allot of info on the subject. Very curious. I think this will be my center of intreset if it is what I think it is.[/quote]

1. I mean some easy to do graphics, or some ripped ones. You know, an outlined, plain coloured hero with no details should be ok. Or maybe you can draw your first character properly. Whatever you find more reasonable.

2. Street Fighter characters range from 100 to 200 pixels tall.

3. Wiz's program just takes a PCX and it extracts small 16x16 or whatever tiles. It can be very handy in first instance.

4. With "rendering", I meant taking your smaller 16x16 bits and building your bigger sprite.

To help you understand this, I made this picture. It is a little bit cheesy, but explains many things:



You see it is a big sprite with irregular shape. When it is standing up, the size will be very different (taller and thinner), so it is better to sub-idivide it in smaller tiles. It also helps with memory usage. You may find that there are many blank tiles that don't need to be drawed.

A rendering routine should take some kind of data structure and place the tiles in the correct place. It can be done easily treating the sprites as "maps" like in a RPG.