Splitting a big TileMap into Sections

Questions
1

Hello, I’m trying to make an older Zelda-like game where the player’s screen shows only one tilemap and when he reaches a border, he would transition to the next tilemap. It looks similar to this.

My issue is that Tiled will give me a big array of the whole tilemap; however, I would like to make a big tilemap in Tiled, that represents the game world and then split it into smaller tilemaps so I can individually parse the arrays of the smaller tilemaps. So my question is: is it possible to break down a big tilemap into smaller tilemaps or is there any way to indicate sections of the big tilemap so I know which section is which to parse?

I’ve checked out this link but it may be dated so I’m asking again.
Thank you for your time and apologies if this question has already been answered recently.

2

In that topic I answered that such irregular areas could be marked with rectangle objects, which I think is still the easiest way to go. If the sub-areas form a regular grid then no real annotation is necessary of course, though you could add some rectangles on a locked layer just to visualize that grid.

Now, this answer assumes that you will have no problem loading the entire world in memory and are just looking for a way to implement that particular behavior of the camera and/or to activate/deactivate the entities within a certain area.

If you really need the map to be physically split so that each part can be loaded independently, then you can use the selection tool and the “Crop to Selection” action to create each part. This process can be automated using JavaScript if you install a development snapshot (since you’ll need some newly added API, like tiled.mapFormat):

  • For each part you want to save:
    • Crop the map to the desired region using map.resize(size, offset, true).
    • Use tiled.mapFormat("tmx").write(map, fileName) to save the part to some file.
    • Undo the resize using map.undo().