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Here’s a tip for anybody using RPG Maker VX.

Removing shadows without extra work

Shadows can cause a lot of problems when you’re trying to make interesting maps. There are a few scripts that just remove all auto shadows so you can put them where you want them. I found that to be far too inefficient to be useful so I wrote a quick script to be able to remove only the shadows I didn’t need.

My helper tiles

I dedicate the bottom two rows of my TileE to helper tiles. I started doing this in with the bottom row in Dawn’s Light but in Lilly and Sasha I’m using two rows. When the game is released I clear the bottom two rows of TileE so all of my sneaky solutions are hidden from view.

From top left you have black and white which are above character and good for hiding things. The star is the shadow remover. The Red lines are one way blockers so you can have a tile that you can enter from the left but not from the right. I didn’t think I would need bottom ones but now I wish I had them. I’ll probably add them for our next game.

The bottom row is the most useful. The green and red are to enable or disable walking on any square. The other colors are mostly for puzzles but help with other things too. Each color represents a certain ground type that I can check from events. More on those later, this blog is about the shadow remover.

What is the point

Each tile has an id that you can check from a script. This is how these tiles become useful. Here’s the ids of my helper tiles.

So you can see that the shadow remover is id 1010. Knowing that I can check if the tile 1010 is used anywhere on the map and if it is, remove the shadow in that spot. So here’s the script.

This script does break grass so you can’t use it to remove those pesky under grass shadows. It’s also takes up the second tile so you can’t put a chair on the same tile but we just use events if we really need something at the same place.

The age of efficiency

The shadow remover is just a simple thing but it makes my life easier. Well Andrew’s life really since he does most of the maps. =)