Is the "Worlds" feature being worked on?

Questions
1

Thanks for the great tool.

I think the worlds feature is quite cool, but to be usable for me I would need editor support for dragging around maps on the canvas. Are you actively working on this feature or is this something I would have to add myself?

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2

The worlds feature is part of Tiled and as such could be considered under continuous development, though for Tiled 1.3 only some small improvements have been made.

Making the worlds editable in Tiled was part of the initial plan for 1.2. However, I didn’t get around to it. It would be a significant effort and those who asked for this feature were not very interested in it since their maps were in a grid and they relied on the pattern matching approach.

However, there are of course several projects that would benefit from just being able to drag a map into the world and then drag it the right place, and it’s something I’d eventually still like to see.

I wonder if this would make sense as a new tool or as a new “WorldEditor” (next to “MapEditor” and “TilesetEditor”). I think the latter would suit better with the file-based undo system we have right now and it would avoid potential complexity when adding it as a new tool to the “MapEditor”.

Let me know if you’re interested in helping out with this feature!

3

I think a WorldEditor would make the most sense, it would fit well with how the rest of Tiled is structured. Maps don’t need to know about the worlds they’re in, so worlds shouldn’t impact map tools beyond navigating between maps.

I’m one of the people interested in this feature because although my maps are on a grid, I sometimes need to move things around, insert maps between other maps, etc. It would be very convenient to be able to move individual maps as well as groups of maps. Because I can’t do this, I’ve taken to meticulously planning out my room placement outside of Tiled before building anything (sketching them in Photoshop, where I can drag things around freely).

4

yes I’m interested in adding some functionalities, at least to be able to add and move maps around. I’ve not yet used the world feature much, but my original plan was to simply add some tools (basically move / add / remove ) to the existing editor.

Making a separate editor sounds nice, but makes it probably less usable for me and I am not sure if I can handle that. I have no QT experience and am new to the Tiled source.

I didn’t even think about undo, but that would be needed at some point and could be tricky with the simple approach, I agree… maybe an idea to make it possible could be to have two separate modes: map and world editing mode, which would also change the affected undo stack alongside available tools?

5

I would be highly interested in more features in the world file. For one, it would be great to add the json format to the documentation, as I think it is the only one missing. I use the world file to enumerate my levels (which are all tilemaps, but no actual need to visualize them all so the coordinates are not so meaningful to me).

What would be great now would be a way to specify properties on world level that follow the same definition like the normal properties, with different types and values. But they should not inherit down to the maps. They should only reside in the world file so that content authors have a convenient and consistent way for specifying properties, in maps and the generic ones for the world.

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6

So from what I saw in the code, currently the editor doesn’t care about any other properties from the ones it’s aware of. What that means is that you should be able to put whatever properties you want right inside the file, it should still work.
However if my world-tools will ever make it into Tiled, it would overwrite these custom properties, as it would completely re-create the file when the world file is saved.

7

Yes exactly. I have added a custom properties section now (compatible to all other property sections), like shown below. It would be great to get that into the official spec so that any tool that cares about the world file is aware of that feature.

"type": "world",
"properties":[
	{
	 "name": "Name",
	 "type": "string",
	 "value": "Test Level"
	}
]
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