Week 44
Last update for October!
Tiled Monday
In the past weeks I had made good progress on allowing the user to edit the tileset image referred to by a tileset (as well as its parameters) after adding it. But, this is only one of several kinds of reference that you may wish to change.
I started by dealing with another kind: the image links for individual tiles in a Collection of Images tileset. After about 4 hours of work, I pushed the change making it possible to change such references. In addition, loading a map with broken references to such images no longer fails, but will cause Tiled to show an “image missing” icon in the tileset view as well as the Properties view for those tiles. This should make it clear that there is a problem to fix and where to fix it.
Next, I allowed opening maps with broken references to images for Image Layers. It was already possible to edit these images so that was a small change. The image layers also benefit from the “image missing” icon in the Properties view.
Then I worked on actually allowing to open maps with broken tileset image references, for both TMX files and JSON maps. In this case, the “missing image” icon will currently show for any tile that was actually used by the map.
Now, there was only one type of external reference that could still be broken and that could still not be changed inside Tiled: references to external tilesets. So I used the remainder of the day and some part of the evening to work on this, and it’s almost done. The done part is where you can now actually swap one external tileset for another. What is still to do is that when you load a map with a broken reference to an external tileset, Tiled should probably set up some temporary dummy tileset to take its place until you have replaced it with the right thing.
Later that evening I spent some time to put up a general introduction about Tiled in the documentation. It’s something I had been working on previously and decided to finish it along with linking to the nice tutorials by @serapth.
Looking Ahead
Unfortunately, despite making good progress, I did not manage to get the wip/broken-links branch to a point where I could merge it into master. Getting to that point is my first priority, so here’s a list of what’s missing:
- Maps referencing external tilesets that can’t load should still open.
- The user should get notified about any broken references when opening a map, ideally also providing a fast way to fix the references with a UI like I’ve shown in the first update of this month.
- The automatic tile index adjustment when increasing a tileset image width is currently disabled, and I’d like to look into re-enabling this in a more robust / controllable way.
- The tileset view still needs to properly deal with non-consecutive tile IDs, as can happen now that the tile IDs are stable when removing images from an Collection of Images tileset.
These are the things I’ll set out to resolve upcoming Monday.
Finally I want to thank again my patrons and sponsors for their continuous support, without which I would not be able to do this work! If anybody else is reading this, please consider becoming a patron so that eventually I could improve Tiled even faster by working on it for two full days per week!