Comments on:

By: MM

MM — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:01:46 +0000

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.

By: yv3

yv3 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:20:18 +0000

This is my technique to arrange tiles :

http://yv3.yv.ohost.de/forum/index.php?topic=16.0

By: Epsicode

Epsicode — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:50:32 +0000

I meant paint bucket tool in the third point

By: Epsicode

Epsicode — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:49:35 +0000

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.

By: MM

MM — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:02:01 +0000

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.

By: Mooseral

Mooseral — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:28:05 +0000

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.

By: niko šveikovsky

niko šveikovsky — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:56:18 +0000

you fellows are forgetting a post MM made about the problems with map-painting:

http://mm.soldat.pl/?p=201

By: rfreak

rfreak — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:42:09 +0000

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.

By: Tenshi

Tenshi — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:29:16 +0000

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?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:29:43 +0000

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?