Discussion on major change to Tiled. (World-space Editing)

To begin with, this isn’t a feature request. Just thought I’d make that clear. I don’t think this would make for a good feature request, as it wouldn’t benefit the majority of users most likely (plus it’s probably not a quick job). I’m just hoping to get some insight and advice on the matter.

I’m developing an engine to allow the player to explore an isometric open world. Using Tiled is a big plus as it saves me a huge amount of time not having to develop a custom map editor. Currently however, to use Tiled for this every map has to be treated as a chunk, and chunks have to be edited individually.

My idea is that I could make a revision to Tiled that allows world-space editing. Chunks of the world-space would automatically be loaded/unloaded based on the users camera position. That part probably isn’t too complicated. There’s other things of course to consider such as resource management. I’ve considered perhaps just forcing chunks to keep their own resources. Having some sort of world-space master file would likely be beneficial for various reasons.

In the opinion of a Tiled developer, what would be a good way to approach this issue? What part of Tiled would I need to work with? Any insights would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Check out my suggestion here which explains how to use images (ideally from image sets rather than image layers) as a way of creating sub-maps which you can then manage from a larger overview map. Solution for Nested Maps