Feedback after a couple months with Tiled

[bjorn (Thorbjørn Lindeijer)]

@eevee

I spent the whole year so far basically just making games in LÖVE with Tiled. I went all-in on it — the vast bulk of game data is crammed into Tiled one way or another — and it saved me an awful lot of time and effort, sometimes in ways I didn’t expect. Thank you for making it!

It’s amazing that you could do such a thing and great to hear that you’ve enjoyed using Tiled in the process!

@eevee

Apologies for the slightly preposterous length of this list, but I’m guessing this is a nicer format than suddenly getting 200 GitHub emails.

I think it’s better this way too. I can’t reply to everything at once, so I’ll go category by category. Thanks a lot for providing all this detailed feedback! And good timing too, now that many student are looking to submit their first patch as part of applying to the Google Summer of Code.

Map canvas

@eevee

The mouse wheel scrolls the map vertically. This is a 2D canvas, so it ought to zoom instead.

Opened Consider zooming with mouse wheel by default · Issue #1472 · mapeditor/tiled · GitHub

@eevee

Occasionally I roll the mouse wheel, and the canvas instantly jumps to some point high above the map itself.

Hmm, I never noticed this myself and it’s the first time I head about it. Any specific way to reproduce it?

@eevee

Ctrl-= is ambiguous, according to Qt? I get a generic dialog that doesn’t tell me what the ambiguity is, and suggests I use Settings → Configure Shortcuts to resolve it (which of course doesn’t exist). I’m using KDE, so it might be coming from there too.

Sounds like an issue limited to KDE indeed, but would be interesting if we can find a workaround for this.

@eevee

The shortcut for rectangular marquee is R, but I think the de facto standard is M.

Not sure, but I based the shortcuts on GIMP which uses R for Rectangular Select and M for the Move Tool. I guess this would be something for configurable shortcuts.

@eevee

Ctrl-Y should probably also work as Redo

I agree it probably doesn’t hurt to have both, so consider it done.

@eevee

Switching between the eraser and brush is annoying. I’d like to just be able to pick up and “place” the empty tile with the brush. (This is how I work in Aseprite, too; I rarely use the actual eraser.)

Curiously, this is already how the terrain tool works.

Right, sometimes this is what you want, sometimes it isn’t. If any empty tile in the brush would erase what is already there, then it would be annoying to work with any non-rectangular brush that is meant to only modify the part it is placing. I’m not sure how Asesprite works here, but in GIMP a textured brush works the same way.

Maybe this should be a toggle once a tool-specific toolbar UI is introduced.

The terrain tool is different in the sense that it never has empty parts in its stamp. It either places some terrain, or it places no terrain (erases).

@eevee

Right-clicking with the eraser… just erases. I do this a lot when I think I have the brush selected.

It’s actually since recently a rectangular erase. Of course, that doesn’t help clear up confusion between doing rectangular erase and capturing a stamp. Not sure what to do here.

@eevee

Right-clicking with the bucket fill doesn’t select tiles.

Yeah, I agree it should. It’s covered by issue #790.

@eevee

The ability to draw with a selection of several tiles is great! Alas! If I select a block of off-sized tiles from a tileset, Tiled will try to draw them in adjacent map tiles, rather than spacing them out to preserve their appearance as a block.

I know this is unsolvable in the general case, but I’ve only ever wanted to do it with a tileset whose size is an integral multiple of the map’s tile size.

I’ve opened an issue about this: Smarter behavior when selecting multiple tiles from the tileset · Issue #1474 · mapeditor/tiled · GitHub

@eevee

I can’t move chunks of the map around! The tile select tool always creates a new selection. This is really bad. Like, really, really bad. Even the PICO-8 map editor can do this. It made iterating on maps a lot more cumbersome. I can cut and paste, but that doesn’t paste empty tiles; “offset map” works on the selection, but it’s nearly useless here.

Yeah, it’s definitely a weak point for Tiled. There’s an issue open about adding a Move Selection feature.

@eevee

There’s no way to flip a tile selection — for example, if I want to make a room go right-to-left instead of left-to-right.

You can flip by capturing (or cutting) the tiles, pressing Y or X to flip in either direction, and then painting the section again. What people often run into though, is that this also flips the tile graphics. So a way of flipping without affecting graphics would be needed.

@eevee

An object selection offers the deceptive “flip horizontally” and “flip vertically”, but those just flip each selected object in-place, rather than flipping their positions within the selection.

Yeah, there’s a TODO entry about this in the code… I’ve turned it into a bug report.

@eevee

Ctrl-Shift-A clears a tile selection, but not an object selection. I notice that the tile selection is still visible when on an object layer, and Ctrl-Shift-A will still clear it. Odd.

Ctrl+Shift+A does clear an object selection. Whether it clears the tile selection or the object selection depends on whether you have a tile layer or object layer selected. I can’t reproduce the behavior you described.

@eevee

After copying or cutting a tile selection, pasting it will set it as the current brush… centered on the mouse cursor. This seems sensible enough, but if I’m copying a large block of tiles between layers — say, moving all of a particular tile onto another layer — then I have to figure out how to align them all with where they were originally.

I think the usual image editor approach is that if the source position is still visible, then pasting will give you a floating selection in the same place; otherwise, it’s centered. Of course, Tiled doesn’t have floating tile selections, so I don’t know what the equivalent would be.

Indeed Tiled doesn’t have floating selection, but for this use-case “Paste in Place” was added (for objects in Tiled 0.17, for tiles in Tiled 0.18).

@eevee

Selecting tiles marks the map as modified. (Perhaps because it creates an undo entry? As it should!)

That’s indeed because there is an “unsaved” undo entry. It’s not really an issue, is it? Would be some work to change, since we could no longer rely on QUndoStack::isClean.

@eevee

Clicking once with the move tool marks the map as modified, despite not actually moving anything.

Yeah, I also noticed this, and now it’s fixed.

@eevee

Switching to an image layer causes the move tool to be the active tool, because it’s the only one that’s valid on an image layer. Okay. Switching to any other layer then keeps the move tool as the active tool, even though I didn’t choose it myself and didn’t use it. This has caused a few surprises.

I find this also very annoying. Unfortunately the tool manager at the moment doesn’t know why some tool may choose to disable itself or not, and it only takes action when the current tool becomes disabled. I could try to find some way to make it switch to the last active tool for each layer type, or maybe it should not switch tools at all and the tool should just refuse to work. What do you think?

@eevee

If I erase a tile in a spritesheet — that is, edit the image to erase the tile — but had forgotten the tile was still in use, it’s hard to notice anything’s awry. Until I draw a new tile there and something unexpected pops up in a map. Not sure if there’s any good solution for this, but I’ve done it a couple times now.

A solution I’ve seen in some projects is to not just erase the tile, but to replace it with a noticeable dummy graphic. As for Tiled, it could probably provide some kind of “erase empty tiles” feature somewhere.

@eevee

Occasionally a tile appears to be selected, but actually isn’t, and clicking it doesn’t select it.

I neglected to write down exactly when this happens, but I found an obvious example: with the brush selected, use right-drag to select a block of all the same tile. That tile will be the only one selected in the tileset, but clicking on it won’t change the brush to a single copy of that tile.

Right, only a change in the selection causes the stamp to be updated. Now it happens on mouse click as well.

@eevee

If I have the map properties open, switch to another map, and then switch back, the properties panel will now be showing a tile’s properties.

Hmm, this happens until Tiled 0.18 when the selected tileset is not the first one, because switching back to the map also switched back to that tileset, which then sets that tile at the current object. The problem is gone in the development snapshots, because you can no longer change tileset, tile or terrain properties directly from the map editor (you need to switch to the tileset editor for that).

If you get a chance to try out the development snapshots, I’d really welcome feedback about the changes there as well!