Week 42 development update

Development
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It’s been a week since I’ve spent some time setting up this forum. I haven’t gotten around to starting any interesting topics yet nor has it been announced yet apart from posting the link on IRC. So what did happen in the past week?

Hexagonal Renderer

One week ago I pushed the initial version of a hexagonal map renderer to Tiled master. This week I’ve had very little time for coding, but I’m slowly progressing on supporting also “flat topped” hexagonal maps. The approach I’m going for was shortly discussed on the mailing list. which is to have an “octagonal” renderer that will handle all variations of hexagonal as well as isometric staggered maps.

When that is done, I hope to still find some time to also support “hexagonal isometric” maps, which look diamond shaped but have easier to work with tile coordinates due to the lack of staggering.

Pull Requests

  • MERGED: The about dialog got a maximum size (#798)
  • MERGED: Italian translation got a small update (#804)
  • UPDATED: Ability to rename custom properties (#803)

The last one is pretty close to being accepted and is a frequently requested feature (#772). I just need to spend some time trying the behavior and checking the code.

A Look Ahead

I don’t like looking ahead, especially since I can still not guarantee having time at all. My goals are to link this forum from the Tiled website, make a Tiled 0.10.2 maintenance release, finish the support for hexagonal maps, look into pending pull requests like #776 and #779 and then release Tiled 0.11. I won’t finish all of that in one week, especially since I will be visiting family next weekend, so more on the next update!

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Yay. This sounds awesome!

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First goal reached, this forum is now linked from the Tiled website! :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Dear Sir,

a- thank you for putting this editor out for free, very generous and admirable.

b- Im talking to CodeAndWeb GmbH; creators of TexturePacker™ to include your tilemap .tmx files as a standard import format (no thanks needed its all for our own good as well =)) Also I will be persuing this no matter the outcome of text below.

We’ve been using TileEd to protrotype our tilemaps quickly.

After discovering you can actually rotate and flip tilestamps/tiles we abandoned, or at least considering to abandon, building our own level editor and go the TileEd way.

c - Im willing to donate/share a, reasonable, percentage of the income of our games build with TileEd support to the future development and support of this tool.
c sub - how much would you deem sufficient (money wise) to implement the feature requested below.
Currently im on 0,00 extra funds but perhaps I could convince our bank or start a private crowd funder to meet your/our needs. As it stands, I can only offer a % of future profits or perhaps a medium donation to be able to use TilEd with an addition. Otherwise I will ahve to redirect funds to have a custom editor build.

d - To be able to use Tiled (and others like us I’m guessing) I have a few requests/observations that I hope I can persuade you to implement.

Optimizing using tilemaps/atlasses makes us use singular tiles for corners/borders and rotating them, fortunately, TileEd supports this.
Using the terrain editor is almost essential for speedy map creation.
Alas it uses the tilesets as is… this requires all the terrain tiles to be in the tileset.
In our case, we lack all the corner tiles to be able to create/use the terrain feature.

Observation: All/ most terrains have two sets… outer and interior edges (currently implemented by supplying them pre assembled in the tileset and assigning the terrain features using the terrain corner tool).
Not having all the required corners (because we rotate) in the tileset is a setback.
Request: Would It be possible for you to create a terrain setup where it is allowed to select tiles from the tilemaps with adding flip/rotation and using those as terrain?
Like virtual tilemaps used for terrain drawing but beeing a subset from the already defined tilesets.
This would be extremely usefull and efficient.
Then you/we/ could define terrain from a selection of already imported tilesets without having to pre- duplicate, rotate and include extra GFX, but still use the very powerfull and usefull terrain feature.

In any event, very nice editor, I salute you.

Highest regards,
Mac
CEO of PalaceOfPortablePleasures

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Dear Mac,

Thank you for your message. I’m glad to hear Tiled suits your needs very well, but I understand you lack support for using flipped tiles with the terrain tool. This is certainly a feature I could consider adding. I won’t make an estimate on the cost in public though, so if you’re interested in sponsoring this feature directly please e-mail me privately at bjorn@lindeijer.nl.

Otherwise, any contribution is appreciated and I’ll anyway consider your request, as well as many others, when I have some time again for improving Tiled. You can either contribute directly to my monthly goal on Patreon or donate more generally through PayPal as listed on the donation page. Thanks!

Best regards,
Bjørn