Collision Detection in FF6LE

When I make map edits in FF6LE (or Zone Doctor, prior), I'm having problems getting collision to work correctly when rearranging objects. The objects I'm having trouble with are the ones where you can walk on the tile from the top, but not the bottom. Examples include chairs, pots, etc. When I place these objects, my character sprite briefly clips behind the objects, then pops up on top. I've tried everything I can think of, but have had to resort to creating an invisible wall 1 tile below the objects when possible so that nobody can notice this graphical error. Has anyone encountered this issue? What did you do to work around it?

I have definitely encountered this issue and it really sucks. I've only ever really copied whole maps over for duplication purposes, but I've noticed sometimes the physical map properties of some tiles did not copy everything over because of the bad layer issues. And I have noticed it just from editing the fence for instance in Thamasa, and placing simple objects like pots, and shrubs... The Level Editor seems to be missing something that is not being copied over correctly, and I suspect it's the same thing that's going on with just placing certain new tiles on the map.

Working with tiles in general is tricky and sometimes if you compare them to another example you'll see that maybe a mistake was made, like make sure that the tile BEFORE the tile in question is set up correctly as well, as the character will go through shit sometimes if it's not a correct one. This was the case for me sometimes, the tile before the tile I thought was the wrong one... And of course check that both layer 1 and 2 are as they should be, though I suspect you're aware of that.

If your certain it is all good to go and should work and still is not, it might be related to the issue that I experience with LE not copying over 100% the map properties, in which case I had to go in manually and compare the two maps hex data and find the stray byte that needed to be changed/copied over. And then it worked.

... ... ...

Actually, I see here in my many notes that I wrote this:

TO FIX BAD LAYER ISSUE WITH BYTE 17 IN LE!:
byte 17 thing does not save with LE, causing layer issues on new maps.

So I guess byte 17 is the one I was going in manually to change, because LE bug does not save it and reverts it to whatever it was. What is byte 17 exactly? I'm not sure, but it does have to do with map properties It seems as it corrected the issues I was having.

Aside from that, I'm not sure why placing new tiles has the character clipping, it seems almost like the maps were made specifically with the tile set properties in mind and built in such a way that changing it will bring on character clipping issues no matter what.

In my case, I edited the dinner table at Gestahl's banquet. Due to my re-arrangement of that story segment, I needed 9 chairs instead of 10, so I deleted the right-most chair and shifted the remaining 4 over by 1 space. That was apparently enough to break things.

When you say byte 17, is that decimal or hexadecimal?

EDIT: Nevermind. In both decimal and hexadecimal, the byte is the same. Looks like I'm seeing something different.

If you're moving something like a chair, make sure you copy both the top tile and the bottom tile on both BG1 and BG2. The same applies if you want to remove a chair.

I'm guessing that your problem is due to the top of the chair being on BG2 instead of BG1. The tile properties (collision detection, sprite priority, z-level, etc.) are all determined by the BG1 tile, so although it looks okay in FF6LE, it won't function correctly in-game. Try moving the top of the chair to BG1 and the floor to BG2.

Byte 17 in the map properties specifies the "sprite overlay", which is a set of sprites that can block out parts of your character when you pass underneath something. I checked the banquet table and there aren't any overlay tiles there, so I don't think that's the problem.

I actually figured this out a while back. It has to do with the physical tile properties the character is standing on. I don't know Zone Doctor well, but in LE you can look at the tile properties under "Physical Tile Editor;" inside there there are things like "solid to tier 1" "solid to tier 2" and a bunch of other bits. If you look at the green carpet in the Figaro Castle tileset, it only has "Solid to tier 2" checked. The normal floor tile has "solid to tier 2" and "0.3" checked. I think that 0.3 might have to do with how it interacts with layer 2 objects.

I'm super rusty, and I may not have all the details right, but look through the physical tile properties if you can in ZD and see if you can find the common thread. But in general, if you copy the whole set of tiles from one map to another it'll work the same way, but you need to include the surrounding tiles to make sure you approach on the correct layer.

B-Run, that did it! There were multiple transparent L1 tiles that allowed movement, but there was one specifically that was needed to make the object layering work correctly.