Suggestion: add more information to current tile information area in the lower left corner

Suggestions
1

In the lower left corner tile tells you about the currently hovered tile in this format:

x, y [index-in-tileset]

What it doesn’t tell you is the tileset used.

I accidentally added a copy of my tileset from another folder into my map and that (of course) broke auto-mapping. But it took me way too long to figure out what went wrong, because there is no way to tell that a tile belongs to another tileset without looking into the tmx file.

So my suggestion would be, to show:

x, y [index-in-tileset] (guid-of-tile)

Showing the tileset name would not help (at least not in my case, because the second tileset had the same name as the first one).

2

Thanks for the suggestion! Until I read all the way to the end of the message, I thought adding the tileset name might be helpful in this case. But then you suggested adding a tile “guid”. Tiles don’t have a guid, so I’m not sure what this should be.

Of course, in a TMX file, tiles do have a global ID, but that ID is map-specific and only exists in the TMX file and not in memory after loading the map. Even if it would persist in memory, it can’t be compared between maps because the tileset can have a different “first global ID” assigned on each map.

If you had two external tilesets with the same name, showing the tileset filename might have helped (possibly including its relative path). If they were two embedded tilesets, then I’m not sure we can really fix this by adding information to the status bar.

I think an alternative option would be to add an action that selects the area of the map in which any of the currently selected tiles are used. That way, you could quickly see where you have ended up using tiles from the duplicated tileset. Would that help you as well? Of course, it could still have taken a while until you figure out why the automapping rules were not working…

3

Hi bjorn,

Thanks for the indepth answer.

After reading it, I think a two-pronged aproach would be best.

How about adding the tileset name to the mouse-over tile information and adding a warning somewhere when two tilesets with the same name are used in a map?