Hi,
Is there any estimated release date external tileset handling?
Meanwhile - we are using json files at the moment. It seems that the tileset information is always located at the end of the json file. So if we have files like level1.json … level30.json, is it okay to just replace the tileset information automatically from the files when needed?
The external tileset handling is being improved for the next release (unfortunately it didn’t make it for Tiled 0.17, but many other improvements happened that make this release worthwhile).
In the meantime, external tilesets are usable and many people do use them. It’s just a bit annoying to edit them, since you need to temporarily import them (pressing the Import button), then change them, and then export them again (overwriting the old external tileset file).
As for estimating the release date for the improvements… it’s hard because there is a lot of work remaining. However, I am definitely aiming for it to be somewhere between 3-5 months from now (and hopefully available in snapshot builds quite a bit earlier).
In JSON, it doesn’t matter where in the file the information is, since you always first read the entire file into some memory structure, before accessing it. It should be OK to replace the tileset information with an external tileset reference (preferably copied from a map that already used the external tileset, to make sure the syntax is correct). One thing you need to be careful about when doing this, is to not modify the value of the firstgid property (it can be different for each map, depending on the order of your tilesets).
The Tiled snapshot builds for Windows and Linux now include the improved external tileset handling. If you’d like to give them a try, feedback is welcome! The snapshots for macOS will be updated tomorrow.