I’m trying to use tiles such as the ones attached in Tiled to create a large world map. The tiles are isometric/hexagonal and have a 28px border at the bottom. To top it off, some tiles also have mountains for example that can increase the size of the images slightly at the top of the image.
Is there any way of configuring the software to work properly with these?
If the ones that go over, such as the mountains, make it impossible. Is there a way of doing it without those variable size tiles?
The fact that some tiles are higher is a not a problem for Tiled. However, what is a problem is that those tiles aren’t simply hexagons, they are hexagons using an oblique projection. This is currently not supported by Tiled.
Since your tiles are rendered, potentially a workable solution would be to render the tiles in orthogonal projection for use in Tiled, and to only use the additional angle in your game?
I’m fairly certain these were rendered using an isometric camera and orthogonal lens (at least according to Keyshot), the settings are in the screenshot below.
I can’t really render them only in a top-down view for example, as that wouldn’t show the details of most items on top of the tiles. If you’re certain that is an oblique projection, would that be something eventually supported by Tiled? Whatever I can make with Tiled is what will be shown, as it’s a map for a tabletop RPG (either printed or displayed as a picture) and not for a videogame.
The lens may be orthographic, but your tile appears slightly slanted. I believe this would be the “Inclination” setting, which probably needs to be 0 for the tiles to align properly in Tiled. The tile needs to appear straight horizontally.
Ah, then indeed my initial suggestion doesn’t really work. I hope adjusting the inclination is an acceptable compromise.
Btw, which program are you using to render your tiles?
Inclination 0 would give you a completely flat image from the front, like so:
I’m using Keyshot. You can achieve the same grid in Photoshop and similar software making a horizontal hexagonal grid and transforming it by rotating it by -45° and adjusting its height to 57,7%. That should give you a grid that looks exactly like these tiles (blue outline below). In yellow you can see a square transformed in the exact same way as the hex tile, which gives you an isometric grid.
That would make it a vertical hex, which does seem to work with Tiled. I finally understand what you meant by the oblique projection and how the iso tiles work in your software, my apologies for the headache of my post!
Rendering 3000+ tiles again is not something I look forward to, but it seems to be working so I might have to do just that if I want to use the grid. Up until now I was using Photoshop to create the maps so I wasn’t having too much trouble, but snapping to a grid like I can in Tiled should make things considerably faster.
Would that oblique projection be something that could be added to Tiled eventually?
I’d love to help with it if I knew how, but considering the trouble I had the only thing I imagine I could do to help is becoming a patron.
Right, Tiled supports pointy-top or flat-top hexes. It’s fine, no headaches caused!
That could definitely become an option, though right now I can’t say when I’d get around to implementing this. There are a lot of other things to do as well.
I depend entirely on patrons to be able to keep working on Tiled, so that would definitely be welcome! That said, I can also try to guide you through the code and help with ideas on how this could be implemented.
If I could make a suggestion; keep in mind how the map looks in a Tile editor doesn’t have to be the exact same as how it will be rendered in engine. The main benefit you get from using a program like Tiled is visually placing them in the correct order. Where they’re rendered on screen will always be up to you.
OP said that they’re making this for tabletop gaming, so there’s no other rendering engine, they need to export a usable map using their tiles right from Tiled.
