3x3 terrain brush?

Questions
1

Are there any plans to make 3x3 terrains? Right now it’s fixed at 2x2 (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right) and I don’t see anyway to change that. Thanks.

2

You can achieve something very similar with the Wang Tiles feature, by using both side and corner colours. Unlike a 3x3 tileset however, the corner and edge colours are distinct entities, which makes labelling more tedious.
image

Two caveats:

  1. The Wang tiles tool doesn’t allow leaving a side empty, you have to assign colours to every part of a tile for the tile to get used at all. If you want “empty” sides or corners, you have to make a special colour (or colours) for it.
  2. Every tile needs to be filled in for the Wang tiles or Terrain to work correctly. With a single 3x3 terrain or a simple Wang tile set with 2 corner and 2 side colours, that’s 256 tiles. Adding more complex terrain interactions makes this number explode.

Depending on what exactly you need, even if this feature were added, it might not be practical, and AutoMap could work better.

Another alternative is clever use of either corner-based or side-based Wang tilesets, where different colours can represent different terrain combinations (e.g. “path in grass”, “path in sand”, “sand and grass”, “only sand”, “only grass”). This won’t be efficient for a complete tileset with the hundreds of tiles for every combination, but may be work well if the terrain uses a reduced tileset.

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3

@eishiya Great summary of the current problems with the Wang tool! One day I would like to spend some time considering how we can improve the situation. I think it is definitely clear that corner and edge colors need to be merged. And then we need to figure out what the tool needs to do to work nicely with common subsets, like the blob.

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4

Thanks for ideas, I’ll need to spend some time understand this though since it’s pretty complicated. I saw some videos of the Godot game engine and the had a really easy to use 3x3 implementation that would fit well with Tiled’s current design so maybe the developer can consider that.