I have my main layer working at 32x32, but I want a foreground and background layer where the tiles are four times that in each axis.
I don’t want to just add a “large tile” that covers that area because then I’ll run into issues if I accidentally place it in the wrong spot, and I don’t want to divide my tiles into 32x32 chunks because then I’ll have 16 tiles that need to be set up in my game, which also could easily result in my screwing up the pattern somewhere.
Can I just make a layer where one tile is 4x4 of what tiles are in my other layer?
No, all the cells in a map are the same size. The ability to have variable tile sizes per layer has been requested a few times, but it poses significant challenges to implement.
This scripted tool can help you place your large tiles correctly: tiled-scripts/Large Tile Stamp Tool at main · eishiya/tiled-scripts · GitHub
It’ll automatically place tiles at appropriate locations based on their size, so 128x128 tiles will only be placed in every 4th cell. This only works for basic painting though.
You can also use Automapping to automatically correct misplaced tiles in these layers. By using the modX and modY properties, you can have rules that check for tiles at the “wrong” place in the 4x4 area. Moving the tiles would require a lot of rules since you’d need a set of rules for each tile, but deleting misplaced tiles is very simple.
Scripting can be used to fix misplaced tiles without the drawbacks of Automapping.
Is it possible to have a tile visually appear larger? So if I have a graphic that was four times as big as my other tiles, could I place it in one cell it would actually visually overlap the other cells next to it? Thus, even if I have to have the tiles placed every four cells, I can at least visually see it filling the whole space I want in the editor? I’ve done this in Unity before, but I’m pretty new to Tiled, so I don’t know if it can be done.
Make your source tiles larger, and they will appear larger in Tiled. Tiled doesn’t shrink tiles to fit their cells unless you set the Tileset’s tile render size to “map grid” instead of the default 'tile size".
When I wrote “tile size” in a map before, I should’ve said “grid size” or “cell size”. The actual tiles displayed in the cells can be any size.
Okay, thank you. It looks like what I’m trying to do should be fundamentally possible.
By the way, what are the “significant challenges to implement” a variable size to layers? Fundamentally, a layer is just a wholly separate map file that just shares a few data points. If I can create two separate map files with these properties, then the data can exist within the editor and in the file format. How is the editor set up that it couldn’t handle two cell sizes at the same time?
I mean, I get not having an isometric layer or a hexagon layer, and it would add complexity it you allowed for having an offset or cell sizes that don’t scale/nest easily, but in its simplest form the editor could just have a layer that disallows placing a tile in certain cells, or automatically moves a position of a tile to create the same effect. A rule that says “this layer is n times bigger than the other layers” and adjusts user input to fit that value.
Storage isn’t an issue, but the editor UI is. For example, variable tile sizes, even if restricted to multiples of some base tile size, lead to the possibility of partial tile selections. Even if options for how to handle those are added (similar to how there are for Objects), there’s still the challenge of how to highlight the selected cells - it would probably require some sort of additional highlight system because Tiled’s existing one would not be clear enough.