Confusion about terrains and/or wang sets

Questions
1

Hey everyone!

I’m experimenting with Tiled to see if I can use it to edit some really old retro video games. Like NES/SNES era. Right now I’m experimenting with the original Final Fantasy, and am playing around to try to figure out how to set up terrains properly.

Here’s a screenshot of the tileset I have to work with. Note that due to the restrictions of the game I’m working with, I can’t add any new tiles, and I can’t really change the tileset very much (I can, but not in a way that would meaningfully address the problem I’m having)

fftiles_big

To start, I’m focusing on regular ground (tile 0 in upper left corner), and forests (the 3x3 block of tiles just to the right of that).

My problem is, I want to be able to just draw a chunk of forests and have the edges filled appropriately. My understanding is this is what the “Terrains” in Tiled are used for, but for the life of me I cannot get them to work properly.

I set up a “ground” terrain that is all of tile 0 and the outer rim of the 9 forest tiles. And set up a “forest” terrain that is the inner body of those 9 tiles. Then when I go to use the train brush, I get something like this:
terrainbrush

It’s CLOSE, but not quite right. And I understand why – the edges of the forest count as ground and not as forest, so if I draw more forest next to them, it THINKS I’m drawing next to the ground, even though I’m really drawing next to forest.

I have no idea how to solve this, or even if it can be solved. I briefly looked at maybe using Wang Sets instead of terrains but I couldn’t figure out what in the world those were even supposed to be much less how to use them effectively.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can solve this? Thanks.

EDIT:

So it looks like the easier way to do this would be by setting up some automap rules. So I can draw my map using the normal forest and normal ground tiles, then just hit ‘A’ to have all forest edges on the map rounded out.

That’s how I’m going to proceed, but if there’s a way to get terrains/wang sets set up to solve this problem I’m still very much interested.

Thanks everybody!

2

Can you show how you defined the forrest terrain in the tileset? It is indeed the terrain tool you could use in this situation, and it sounds like you got the definition right. If you filled the map with the single grass tile which is defined in the grass terrain, and you then use the terrain tool to draw the forrest terrain on the same layer, it should work. You could also first try it out with the terrain tutorial.

3

This tileset seems incomplete. The forest needs four more corner tiles to draw anything else than rectangular patches. The same goes for the water, light grass, mountains, sand and swamp.

4

I believe the tileset was drawn in a way that allows those corners to be used as both outside and inside corners, by having the transition go diagonal. Neither the the Terrain Brush nor the Wang Brush currently support such reuse of tiles.

That definitely seems like a good way out for now. Alternatively, you could duplicate those corner tiles in the tileset, so that you can tell the Terrain Brush that they can be used as both inner and outer corners.

5

Ah, you mean reusing the central tile as inside corners?

6

Thanks for the replies everyone!

My terrain is defined pretty simply:
tiledterrain

I’m sure adding duplicate tiles to “complete” the terrain would work, but again, that is not an option, as I simply don’t have the tiles to spare (I have a hard limit of 128, and as you can see they’re pretty much all already in use)

And yeah… in normal usage, inside corners are just the center tile. A typical forest might look like this:

tiledforest

I was able to write up a script to generate my automap files that I ALMOST have working, so yeah I’m just going to keep going with that. At least until this can be supported a simpler way.

Thanks again, everyone! =)