Tilesets

The world of Powder is made up of a grid of locations, like a big chess board. The game rendering engine presents the game world to the user by rendering each grid location as a tile, or a set of over-layed tiles. A tile is a 2-dimensional graphical bitmap. There is a tile for each dungeon feature (a wall, floor, pit, lava, etc), a tile for each creature, a tile for each obtainable object, a tile for each creature effect (charmed, asleep, on fire, etc), a tile for each dungeon effect (like smoke clouds, etc), and a tile for each detection modifier (unseen, detected by warning, heard, detected by telepathy, etc).

A single grid location can be rendered by using multiple tiles depending on what objects and effects are in that location. For example, a single grid location could be a floor tile, overlaid with a monster tile, overlaid with an acid cloud.

Similar to the dungeon tiles, the buttons of the interface are stored as 2d graphics bitmap tiles, as is the avatar "paperdoll". Fonts are stored as a set of bitmap graphics of each character in that font.

Most items and monsters in the game are represented by a single item, but a few monsters are represented by 4 tiles in a 2x2 configuration. These monsters occupy all 4 tiles at once.

The look of the game can be changed by selecting different tilesets for the renderer to use to draw the game world with.

Built-in Tile Sets

Powder currently comes with several tilesets built-in:

Tileset Name	Tile Size	Author	Comments
Classic	16x16	?Jeff Lait?
Adam Bolt	16x16	Adam Bolt	From credits: Unsurprisingly, the tiles in the Adam Bolt tileset came from Adam Bolt's tileset.
Nethackish	16x16	Andrea "Widar" Menga	From the ReadMe: These are repainted tiles taken from artpack 045. They now look like those of NetHack.
Graphical ASCII	16x16	Kelly Bailey	Tiles made to look like stylized ASCII characters, in the vein of classic rogue
Akoi Meexx	16x16	Akoi Meexx	From the credits: The Akoi Meexx tileset, which is now the default POWDER tileset.
Akoi Meexx 12	24x24	Akoi Meexx	up-scaled version of Akoi Mexx tiles
Akoi Meexx 10	20x20	Akoi Meexx	up-scaled version of Akoi Mexx tiles
Ibson the Grey	32x32	Ibson the Grey	From the ReadMe: IBSON THE GREY'S POWDER TILESET (32x32) v107 This tileset was designed by Ibson the Grey (a.k.a. Craig Judy)
Chris Lomaka	16x16	Chris Lomaka

Note: In the credits, the following people are listed under Tileset Artists: Adam Bolt, Akoi Meexx, Andrea Menga, Zak, Kelly Bailey, Markus Maier, Ibson the Grey, Chris Lomaka.

To select a tileset go to the options menu (either at the main menu or in-game), selects Tiles, and select a tileset.

Custom Tilesets

Powder allows an external user-created tileset to be used in addition to the built-in sets. The additional tileset will be taken from BMP files located in a folder called GFX alongside the main executable.

Creating A Custom Tile Set

The easiest way to get started making your own tileset is to download the Powder source package and extract the BMP files in the gfx folder to a gfx folder alongside your Powder executable. These bitmap can then be edited using any BMP editor program. The following files will be used by Powder in the gfx folder:

File Name	Tile Count	Description
alphabet_brass.bmp	10x12	Brass Font
alphabet_classic.bmp	10x12	Classic Font
alphabet_heavy.bmp	10x12	Light Font
alphabet_light.bmp	10x12	Heavy Font
alphabet_shadow.bmp	10x12	Shadow Font
dungeon16.bmp	24x13	Main game tiles
mini16.bmp	26x4	Male paperdoll tiles
minif16.bmp	26x4	Female paperdoll tiles
sprite16.bmp	24x6	Game user-interface tiles

Note: that is not a typo in the font files. The heavy file is used for the light font, and the light file is used for the heavy font.

A note on colors in the graphics: The color black (palette color #0) becomes transparent when tiles are overlaid. The lime-green color (0x00FF00) becomes true black.

Additional color note: The game renders in 15 bit color (probably to be compatible with the GBA/DS). Any higher bit colors (such as 24-bit true-color) are converted down. TIP: For 24 bit color (used by modern computers), 15 bit can be approximated by using RGB values in increments of 8.

WIKI TODO: 24-bit true-color BMP files are not rendered properly. 8-bit palette mode is what all current tileset graphics use. Can use 16-bit palette? Can mix and match palettes among files? Tile sizes of 16x16 and 32x32 are known to work, what about others?

User-Made Tile Sets

Screen Shot	Author Name	Tile Set Version	Powder Version	Link
Screen Shot	Mike Ratzlaff	130215	117	download
Added females, changed some creatures, replaced the UI with Lorc's game-icons.net	Sean Osman	1337	117	download