July 2016 development updates

Development
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Week 27

This week I started spending two full days on Tiled! Unfortunately, it was a bad timing because shortly after I got sick. But, I’m finally recovered now so here’s the update!

Tiled Sunday

Most of this day I was working to add configuration options for the theme changes I had started last time, and to clean up the “Tiled Fusion” theme and palette changes before pushing them to the master branch. Here’s the new Theme tab in the Preferences:

Also, I’ve now used the “dark” palette color for the map view background (c5166190), which will generally fit in better than the plain gray used before.

I also fixed the tile index adjustment when tileset images changes width (#1242). After that, there was unfortunately no time left to push the 0.16.2 release, but I pushed the v0.16.2 tag.

Tiled Thursday

In the morning I released Tiled 0.16.2, with quite a few fixes. I also updated the NEWS.md and realized it may be time for a Tiled 0.17 soon, given the number of improvements made on the master branch in the meantime.

My focus in the afternoon was to get back to the wip/tilesetdocument branch and see what things I could fix in order to eventually merge this branch to master. I repaired the layer combo box, the restoring of editor views, the status bar messages and fixed the enabled state of the property browser. However, it was also clear to me, that this branch represents such a big additional change that I should release a Tiled 0.17 before merging it to master.

There are also some workflow questions still open for that branch, and I may end up adding support for projects to solve some things, like tileset management.

Week 28 and 29

Kids Sick, I Sick

First my kids were not feeling well and by Saturday I was sick myself as well. Unfortunately, this affected my ability to work on Tiled on Sunday 10th and Monday 11th. I was able to do only minor changes like some documentation changes and fixing a bug to keep tile animation synchronized (#1288).

It took a long time to recover (I’m still having an annoying cough) so also Sunday 17th and Monday 18th were not the best days, at which point I was also suffering from back pains (which usually happens after a period of being weak, but still carrying my children around).

Defold Export Plugin

Sunday 17th a pull request was opened by @kekdck to add a plugin for exporting a map to Defold. I think this is very interesting since Defold is quite a popular 2D engine. Though it does come with its own editor, its tilemap editing capabilities are really primitive.

I spent some time testing the plugin with Defold and then cleaned up and merged the pull request. I think it’s a good start, but I hope we can achieve better integration later on. Of course, a challenge is that the Defold data structures do not match well with the way Tiled is set up (and long-term, I need to consider how to make Tiled’s data structures more flexible).

More Work on the Theme

Monday 18th I resumed work on the “Tiled Fusion” theme (maybe I’ll still find a better name for this), because I want it to look great when I release Tiled 0.17. I tweaked the margins of the menu bar and the size of item view items. And I spent most of the remaining time trying to improve the look of the tabs, but I didn’t manage to get it to a state I was happy with yet.

Added a Getting Started section to the manual

It’s not a lot, but now there is at least a short section in the manual about the initial steps required to get started with Tiled.

Looking Ahead

So now that I’m healthy again, and with Tiled 0.16.2 out and the dark theme on master, my priorities are:

  • String Freeze for Tiled 0.17 (some urgent issues will still require text changes, so they should go in first).
  • Polishing of the new theme (to the point where it can be the default on Windows and Linux).
  • Continue work on the improved external tileset handling.

Next week I’m visiting my mother in law and my own parents with my family, but first I’ll have another day working on Tiled upcoming Monday (hopefully getting to the String Freeze). Then, I’ll be back on Tiled the second week of August!

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Week 29 (continued)

Tiled Friday

In the morning I wrote the development update above. Then, I pushed a small change to disable the Defold export plugin by default, since it is experimental and engine-specific. After that, I helped karai17 with getting rid of a hack in his Love2D extension library for renderinng Tiled maps, the Simple-Tiled-Implementation.

In the afternoon I resumed work on the new theme, which included a large amount of tweaks. Most importantly, I changed the look of the tabs and their background. Here’s a quick comparison with the standard Fusion theme (first screenshot):

The main inspiration for this look was Photoshop. The darker background tabs provide a much better contrast, and overall it looks nicer.

Week 30

Tiled Monday

In the morning I fixed a small issue with the theme in dark mode, making sure the text wouldn’t get colored. I’ve also added a simple full screen mode (toggled with F11). It currently won’t affect the Tiled UI itself, but it simply causes Tiled to fill the screen entirely, for maximum space.

I spent the whole afternoon looking into and fixing an issue with adjusting a tileset when its image changes size. Since a change in the image width affects the tile numbering, the meta data stored for each tile (custom properties, collision information, tile animations and terrain information) would get mixed up. Now Tiled can correctly move all this data to the right tiles.

In the evening I fixed another small theme issue, making the custom properties readable when using a dark theme.

Looking Ahead

Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to String Freeze for Tiled 0.17 yet. There’s still two pull requests open that may be nice to merge before this (#1323 and #1327), and there are still a number of minor issues to fix with the dark theme. I’ll aim to announce string freeze this weekend, and allow one week for translations updates before making the release. I think 0.17 will be a very exciting release!

Also, later this month there is the Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. I’ll be there on 17th of August. If anybody reading this is going there, please don’t hesitate to contact me since I would very much enjoy meeting up with developers using Tiled.

Finally, thanks to all who’ve purchased Tiled on itch.io or are supporting me on Patreon! You are directly making it possible for me to work on Tiled at this pace, and I look forward to add a lot more nice features upcoming months.

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Great job on Tiled. I was wondering if you or someone else are planning on doing some tutorials especially for using Tiled with Construct 2. It seems like Construct 2 does not allow several layers and displays an error and also when we have only one layer, every tile that has a background is shown as solid which means that it is not really usable.

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Sorry for the late reply, but with Construct 2 being proprietary software you should really try to get help from them with any issues. There is no way I can test or research how their Tiled support really works, nor could I help to improve it.

Did you read this blog post about their support for Tiled maps? I know it’s a bit old, but it was still linked from their documentation:

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No problem and thank you for your reply. Actually I had not seen that. Thanks for the valuable information.