Hey! A bit of a far-out question for you all.
I’ve been using Tiled for a particular project that necessitates the use of metatiles. These are tiles that are composed of smaller sets of tiles.
For example, I would have a 16x16 tile composed of four 8x8 tiles.
I have noticed that Tiled does support automatically updating tilesets read from a .png file without needing to reload the tileset. That is an extremely useful feature.
Following on from that, I would like to take advantage of such by arranging 8x8 tiles inside a map into 16x16 metatiles, and have that map save as a .tmx automatically with every change.
I would then like to use that map to be read as a tileset with 16x16 tileset for use with the ‘final’ map being created.
The idea would be to have the 8x8 tiles be read as a .png file, have Tiled automatically read those .pngs as they update in the metatile map, and somehow have that metatile map be automatically read (according to changes to the base .png, alongside the map itself being edited) as a 16x16 tileset for use by another map.
Arguably, there could be a workaround constantly exporting the metatile map as an image, and then the actual map reading that automatically updated .png, but there’s no assigned hotkey for that function, and the Image exporter gets a bit weird to use regardless.
I hope that this isn’t too bizarre of a question for me to ask! If some form of solid metatile support would be implementable, it would make my life a LOT easier for this particular project being worked on!
EDIT: Working with a friend, we’ve found a method of scripting automatically saving a .tmx and .png at the exact same time.
This doesn’t streamline the whole process perfectly, but this largely fulfills what I was asking about here!
I’d love to see correctly implemented metatiles into Tiled someday. 