I'm making an Art Gallery in pulp in which I'd love to host work from the community, but to build it and display complex multi-tile artwork, I needed a good solution to organize each piece without cluttering up my world tiles. Shoutout to @NaOH on discord who tipped me off to drawing all of the artwork into a single world tile as animation frames and then telling pulp where to display each frame.
I've seen a couple other folks ask about this method, so here is my process for tiling art.
First off, create whatever art you want to display - either frame by frame in the pulp editor or another graphics program of your choice. (Stay tuned for a way to import large artwork to a single tile later in this post)
I used Photoshop to create 1-bit art but any program will do. You need either a png of the correct dimensions that you want to display or if you did it all in pulp (this can be laborious and is exactly what I did at first) then you're set. For this post, I'm going to use a piece called 'Bleh'
The starting photo
The 1-bit artwork. Note this is a 3x4 aspect ratio image that I display over 6x8 tiles so it's dimensions are 48x64px which also equals out to 48 tiles. That's important later.
Once you have the artwork in, it should show up something like this.
Again this image is 48 8x8 frames, but I have 10x10 artwork, 16x9 and even tryptychs which is artwork spread over three panels. You can do any rectangle with this method and by complicating it, could do any other tileable shape.
For each artwork, I make a separate room (and created a frame for it and other elements). The player wanders the gallery and accesses each art and enters that art's room.
Under Construction
Even have an info panel
Pulp tiles the artwork on entering the room. In the editor it looks like this:
As you see, in pulp, only the first frame of the animation is displayed and it fills the space that I want it to display. The animation is set to 0 FPS -- this is REQUIRED.
I initially brute-forced the code to display a particular frame at every x,y I wanted drawn, but that was a stupid amount of code that I fixed with a couple while loops:
Here is the code for all 3x4 ratio rooms (I call them 6x8 as that's the actual tile arrangement I need for this display)
// tiling code for 6x8
on enter do
x = 9
y = 3
f = 0
while y<=10 do
while x<=14 do
tell x,y to
frame f
end
x++
f++
end
y++
x = 9
end
end
x & y are set to the top left coordinates of the area i want to draw and the while loops run until they hit the bottom right coordinates of the draw area.
Some Notes:
- The code will hang if there are less frames in the tile you are drawing then are expected in the while loops. This piece is 48 frames whereas a 10x10 is 100 frames. If I tried to draw this art on a 10x10 area the loops for that room would hang and then draw all the available frames and leave whatever frames were still there from a previous room. So you must be precise.
- For multiple panels, I just run the loop 3 times (for a triptych) but this could be played with.
- I can easily see folks drawing entire rooms like this. I have them set as sprites, but it should work just fine as world tiles. I mainly do that for organization.
- This is Great for Organization. I'd go mad sorting through tiles without this method.
- You CAN draw on top of the tiles afterward. I have one piece of art that I tile and then have world tiles with animations drawn on top covering up some of the frames. So drawing a complex scene and then animating just specific tiles could be really cool.
- I was initially confused as to how to tell pulp Which Tile to pull the frames from but it will change the frame of whatever Tile is at the x,y coords it is looking at. That's why I fill that whole space in the editor with Specified Tile of the Art and then the code adjusts which frame is written to each coord as soon as you enter the room.
- Making these as Player Tiles with transparency got real weird. I haven't tested this much and probably won't for this project. I assume a player could walk over these with transparency but again, haven't tried yet.
- I don't know how performant this is, as I haven't tested on real hardware. The code only calls on enter room so I don't think there should be any issues, but would love for someone to try it out and let me know it works fine. I'm hoping to release a prototype soon.
AND NOW for that hot-importing-art tip I mentioned!
I was originally drawing in photoshop and replicating it in pulp, dot by dot. It was taking Hours. I needed a way to import artwork into a single tile as multiple frames. @Neven mentioned somewhere along the line that for importing and exporting, Pulp gives what it expects. So I exported a single one of my art tiles and got the magic naming structure!
I have an image of Bleh saved as 'Bleh 6x8.png' in my laptop folders but to import it as a single tile it must be saved nearly exactly as follows:
pulp-tile-0-layer-Sprites-fps-0-count-48-table-8-8.png
It Must start with pulp- etc from what I can tell, but I save a copy of every art now and name it exactly that with one exception. I change the count - in this case 48 - to whatever number of frames the artwork will take. So a 10x10 would be 100
pulp-tile-0-layer-Sprites-fps-0-count-100-table-8-8.png
and a 16x9 would be 144
pulp-tile-0-layer-Sprites-fps-0-count-144-table-8-8
Since I organize all my artwork into a separate folder per piece on my PC, I can keep them separate and just use these specifically named files for import.
Ok, so that was a Lot! But I have my process down now, and I can't wait to see what other people do with this system. Pulp has been a blessing and I'm excited to dig into the SDK for more complicated projects.
Also! I'll also post separately soon, but if you have cool art, I want to see it! I'm hoping to fill this gallery with pieces from the community and offer it to the community ideally free of charge. I could even see doing periodic showings/collections and making it something like an interactive zine. So stay tuned and in the meantime, hit me up if you want in!
) thanks for sharing it!!
