Location of the Windows Configuration

Questions
1

Hi,

I’m currently developing a level editor based on Tiled with another programmer. We’re now having the issue that it starts on his PC, but crashes on mine. We’re pretty sure there is some setting stored on my PC (Windows) that causes the crash. I read somewhere that the config is stored in the Registry - but where? I’d like to reset it so we both have the same state.

Thanks!

2

Tiled uses the Windows registry to store its settings. You can find them at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\mapeditor.org\Tiled

I’m curious, what are you changing about Tiled for your project?

3

Ah, thanks!

It’s going to be the community level editor for our game (Roll Playing Game, if I’m allowed to mention), so we’re removing a lot of Tiled’s features that aren’t needed when building levels for the game to make sure that the created levels are compatible with the game. Much of the work also went into improving the objects system to allow predefined properties that have default values when inserting the object into the level. Additionally, we’re adding many visual helpers that display the properties of the objects, e.g. a line between a button and a laser beam to see which buttons control which laser beams.

4

Ah, that’s great! I look forward to trying out this editor. My aim with Tiled is to be very flexible and one of the things that is starting to annoy me as it gains features, is that for each user it inevitably has a lot of features that he doesn’t need or even has to avoid using. I’ve already trimmed down Tiled once to make an editor for the game Kodable and now you’re doing something similar, so I will consider ways to make this possible without actually forking Tiled.

Please do let me know once you have a release, or maybe I can already see the changes somewhere?

Your game looks stunning, btw!

5

Thanks! I’m really glad I went with Tiled for map creation, awesome work. If you’re interested, here is a short blog post about my workflow (from Tiled to UE4). That was all done with an original Tiled build, no modifications. For the community editor this was not really an option (can’t just share the game’s UE4 project + too much stuff to take care of manually) and that’s the reason we’re now building a new version adjusted to the game that doesn’t need the UE4 project.

A modular approach like e.g. the Atom editor does is cool, but I guess that would be a lot of work for you. In most cases games simply are too different from each other and need detailed adjustments or new features that require code changes anyway. At least when using it as a level editor for players - if it’s only used by developers creating the game, they probably know which buttons to press and what features to stay away from. :smiley: In the latter example it would maybe suffice to allow more configuration of which elements to show or hide (even for context menus)? Or how do you plan to approach this?

Our current build is quite messy, not sure if you’d want to see that haha. We’re currently working on a validator that checks the map for errors like “no finish hole set” and “this button has no laser beam target defined”. That’s the last major feature we’re going to add before refactoring/cleaning it up (and removing everything from the UI that is not used). Then (around November) we’ll upload the editor for testing + the source code. I’ll probably write a detailed blog post about what we changed/added/removed.

6

I had already read your blog post with much interest. I’m glad to hear you are happy with choosing Tiled!

My approaches to this customization problem would be:

  • Move major features in plugins so that they can be easily disabled entirely when not wanted.
  • Make Tiled scriptable, moving as many of Tiled’s functionality into scripts. Again, this allows easily disabling unwanted functionality, but it would at the same time enable adding game/engine specific things.
  • Add a project file that stores project-specific settings and defaults.
  • Add a way to define the properties for different object types and their default values. This would be both about types like “Map” and “Tileset” as well as different types of custom map objects.

The validators you’re currently adding would be a perfect example of something you could do with a script.

7

That sounds great! Especially adding script support would be a huge benefit.

Regarding objects:
We also had a few problems with restricting object types to specific layers. Adding such a restriction led to multiple usability nightmares. How would we make it clear which object in this 8x8 tile grid belongs to which layer? Our first attempt was to automatically select the right layer when a tile is clicked, but that quickly got confusing (we have 2 tile layers and 2 object layers). Even more so, if the user manually changed the layer in between.
In our current approach, we have disabled the tileset panel completely and moved the tiles to separate toolbar actions. When selecting a layer, only the actions/tiles of that layer are available. This also made sure that the object tiles can’t be added to the map as standard tiles, but only as object tiles on the object layers. I think it works fine that way, but we’ll see what the testers will say.

(just noticed that we’re slightly off-topic here :stuck_out_tongue:)