This seemingly simple "walking up tiles to give the impression of elevation" gif is actually a remarkable indication of what romhacks can do and I will tell you why after the break.
ok have you been clickbaited? good.
did you know that, until gen 4, there were no sideways stairs with any depth of movement in pokemon? the dungeons and caves were just designed around it!
look at that! all of those pointless Cave Bridges, in place entirely because the only way to change elevation levels is forward, vertical stair tiles.
the only horizontal stairs are ones where you exit or enter an area, and a little animation moves your guy up or down the stairs rather than the camera following your movement. Like the Rocket Hideout, for example. no map elevation is tied to this! it's just an animation.
i never realized this until starting a romhack. it's not really something you think about!
here is what this elevated trash junk looks like without any sort of romhack magic.
(you'll have to forgive some layering issues because i was just trying to get the look of the tiles themselves right before working on their behavior with the player character)
It's so flat... lifeless...! no sense of SCALE... you are not climbing this junk, it is just a funny carpet pattern. pathetic.
https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=378934 6 years ago, spherical-ice on pokecommunity fixed this and gave us true stairs. it's not perfect - NPCs won't interact with these slants, and it's a little hard for my un-code-brained self to wrap my mind around setting up the tiles for this. you have to map a specific "behavior byte" to every individual stair tile, and you're going to have to create some visually redundant tiles with different behavior bytes in order to accomplish the effect properly, and keep track of which stairs are going which way. easy for the edge tiles, not so easy for the central stairs which look visually indistinct.
if this means nothing to you, let me just say simply: setting up stairs is a pain in the ass.
but after messing around with making new maps in gen 3 pokemon, I can safely say that this is genuinely a huge feat. pokemon gen 3 romhacking is so cool because you are using literally 2 decades worth of innovations and information. you have so much to use and reference!
let's revisit the initial gif again.
you can see that, on the right side stairs, i messed up a little. one of the diagonal tiles has the wrong behavior byte because i got it all confused. but i mostly got it right! and it feels great and it adds a lot to this area - instead of being two intersecting crossroads with some weird junk in the middle, you fully get the impression that an overhead tunnel collapsed in on one below it.
incidentally, i found out while grabbing a screencap of the rocket hideout in advancemap for this post, that i accidentally overwrote a bunch of tiles that are used in other maps and are simply invisible when working on other tilesets, while setting up the new devastated trash tiles for THIS map. so i am going to have to start from scratch on this map.
ehh to...... blehe!
