This is a wishlist of items I have accumulated through pretty intense use of Tiled for the last year or so. Most of them are relatively small.
Ability to drag a selected area of tiles. Currently I must cut and then paste a selection to move it around.
When a group of tiles is cut and then pasted, it remembers where it was cut from and pastes to the same position. Imagine trying to move a segment from three overlapping layers of tiles onto a different three layers. You must cut and paste and position each one, and align them. It is quite the chore.
Hotkey to toggle the “Random” button. I often need to switch rapidly between using it and not. I would suggest Q.
Brush sizes. This is a big one, and I think the single feature that would improve Tiled more than anything. I often need to paint larger areas or space with tiles. Sometimes I can just draw a border and then fill it. But only if there are not already other tiles there.
Bring brush functionality to the eraser tool. Sometimes I want to erase a line, or a circle. If there were brush sizes, it would be great to have a larger eraser.
Give the fill tool the ability to right click select, same as the brush tool currently has.
Reflect selections made with the right click select in the Tilesets panel. It is nice to see which exact tile you have. Often it is easier to differentiate by the position in the tileset than the actual look of the tile (which is obfuscated by the mouse cursor).
These are all the things I can think of right now. Tiled is a great tool, but these are all things I have wished for during my time using it. I see a lot of cool ideas like scripting and such. But for me, the greatest improvements involve refining the basic user experience. I spend many hours working in Tiled so anything that makes that work smoother and more pleasant is very welcome.
Completely agree on that one. Every time there’s a large area with “random” tiles and I want to “flatten” it to a single tile, ie to start over in that particular area or layer.
Usually I build myself a bigger “brush” on a separate layer via copy & paste in order to fill larger areas where the fill tool just won’t help anymore.
First of all thanks for the big list and for refocusing some attention back to improving some of the basic functionality in Tiled. Indeed you’re right that it’s easy to get carried away by cooler sounding stuff.
I think this would require a separate tool, or support to “float” the current selection, which would allow dragging and then merging it down somewhere by “anchoring” it, which is how it commonly works. Either way it’s not trivial which is why I haven’t done it yet given that you can just Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V.
Hmm, this doesn’t work with the way pasting currently works because the tiles end up on the brush and not on the map initially. I think this would also need to be changed to base on “floating” selections to do the positioning.
Right, that’s easily added. I wish we could use R, but alas that means Rectangular Select. No objections to Q.
Usually as Steffen said you can just draw some tiles on the map and then use right-click drag to capture it, which makes you a bigger brush. Because of this, implementing a separate brush tool that would take a size parameter has not been one of my priorities. I agree it would be useful though.
Yep, bigger eraser is sorely missing. Currently the only alternative is using the selection tool and then deleting the selection with Delete.
Right, that’s quite a strange omission really.
A small problem here is of course that right-click selections may contain tiles from differet tilesets, so it would not in general be possible to switch tilesets. But maybe that would be disturbing in general anyway. It should definitely be possible to adjust the selected tiles in the tileset view to reflect those used on the brush. I think it has also been suggested to have a “locate tile” tool that would allow you to pick one tile from the map and it would switch to that tileset and select and scroll the clicked tile into view there.
Thanks again for providing your feedback after using Tiled for such a long time. I’ll definitely aim to include some of these improvements in the next release, and to address them all eventually.
Thanks for the detailed response. Tiled is a great tool, and enables the game I am making. So thanks for that. I have set up a 5$ monthly patronage to help support it’s development.