Creating tile maps is a pain in the ass, especially when you’ve got 100s of tiles. How would you arrange data differently to make it easier?
Written by MM. Posted at 11:42 am on October 27th, 2009
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http://www.tilemap.co.uk/
and
http://mapeditor.org/
using an editor and store maps into xml (with compression) can save you from hell 😀
if you insist on tiles: most used ones first, sorted by orientation/whatever, tagged
since engine 1, the unreal editor sorts textures as such:
every texture theme gets its own file, be it rusty industrial bits or nature texures. the textures in each file are then sorted into more specific categories, such as floor, wall, pillar, trim, decoration, window, and so on. this makes it so that one can very easily find the texture one is looking for.
naturally, this method can be applied to tilesets.
Use a quadtree structure instead? Bigger “tiles” can just be repeating textures.
Drawing the maps as big images with no tiles?
The artist can make much more beautiful maps while you don’t need to make tile map editors etc. But dunno how the collisions would work…
waht u mean by that? making the map in an editor or something releted to hard coded stuff? tiles are bolcks so why not making blocks of tiles?
A:I would let a graphic artist do it.
Rivon’s approach is awesome as well, but I remember you discarded that a long time ago. Or is entire-map-paiting still a possibility?
I doubt that you can have so much precision (pixel per pixel) while having really big maps without lag. I believe that’s why “big images” map aren’t good.
you fellows are forgetting a post MM made about the problems with map-painting:
http://mm.soldat.pl/?p=201
Entire map painting for moddable games also frequently just results in heaps of MSPaint maps. Look at Liero, for instance; many of the prettiest maps sucked for game play, and many of the best playing maps looked quite terrible.
Even modern hand-painted games seem to rely on tile-ish systems, although these tiles frequently do not land on a grid.
Tile-based systems essentially result in far more equal quality levels between maps. That said, I have very little knowledge in the way of how to actually implement them, so I’ll end this here.
Those are good ideas. Keep them coming if you have more.
My idea is to store besides just the tile number and file also a lot of additional data. Like the heading of the tile, is it collidable, does it have moss etc. This will use some memory but it will allow a lot of possibilities like dynamic sorting of tiles.
I worked extra hard on my game engine’s authoring tool to make the Tile Editor efficient: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pihVtTwJsrk at 00:56)
– selection tool (consecutive tiles or not) with copy/paste for quickly drawing patterns of tiles, instead of painting one tile at a time
– brush tool to draw tiles, can draw multiple times the same tile if needed, to fill a big area
– paintbrush tool to fill an area with a tile, easily achieved with a recursive algorithm
– delete tool
Each tile supports 4 rotations (by 90deg ofc) and HFlip/VFlip.
I meant paint bucket tool in the third point
This is my technique to arrange tiles
:
http://yv3.yv.ohost.de/forum/index.php?topic=16.0
Epsicode: That’s a nice editor, too bad I don’t like tools programming. Big thanks for mentioning hflip and vflip I didn’t think of it!
yv3: you got to spend some time offline which is always cool :).
This breaks my postulate “Don’t do what a computer can do for you”. I’m trying to make the computer do this stuff.