I use the automapping tool a lot, especially for buildings. But I have more than a hundred buildings set with automapping rules, and some are very tall. So when I want to place them, it’s sometimes hard to figure out how will the building be generated on the map.
One improvment could be to add a previsualisation option that would display the all automapped ensemble when the input tile(s) and the input layer are selected and when hovering over the map with the mouse (like it does currently with selected tiles from the tilesets).
Yes, it’s a great suggestion and something I’ve wanted to implement for a long time already (including fixing up the undo so that it doesn’t require a lot of small steps due to the automapping rules being interleaved with your own changes).
Unfortunately, it’s also rather non-trivial to implement. Partly because many automapping rules are designed to influence rules that are applied afterwards, and when the changes are only aggregated in a “preview” then there would need to be a mechanism that checks if there’s a tile in the preview for a given layer and if not, falls back to the map itself. There is some precedence for this in the Wang tool, though it only works on one layer at a time.
In addition the preview will currently not be able to handle the addition of objects, which is however an option with automapping rules.
But overal, I couldn’t agree more and definitely aim to look into this in the future.
