One of the things I’ve been particularly interested in with Tiled is how to make it understand RPGMaker autotiles, which are stored in a compressed format.
There’s an open issue about supporting these natively in the editor, and there are a number of converter scripts – not least eishiya’s Tiled extension, which I poked around in and modified quite a bit. A couple other people have also posted about these here on the forum.
After awhile I came to the realization that, although eishiya’s script is very useful, it’s ultimately spitting out the exact same tmx file every time you call it – the only difference is the referenced image and perhaps the tile size. The original script effectively encodes a tmx as a Javascript array and applies it multiple times in a fixed pattern to produce the resultant tmx. So, I thought, why not just take a tmx file as input instead? This makes it much easier to actually make your own layout (if you needed that for some reason) or, perhaps more importantly, to support the older layouts used by RPGMaker 2000, 2003, and XP.
I think something approaching this could be a good candidate for actually including native support in the Tiled editor – though this can all be handled by scripting, it would be much nicer if it could be integrated into the New Tileset dialog instead of being a separate menu item.
Anyway, I went ahead and wrote a script that does exactly that, together with templates that work with every RPGMaker format I’m aware of all the way back to 2000. (Most of these layouts were actually created with a modified version of eishiya’s script; the 2k layout was drawn manually though, and is probably not quite right.) There are templates for the well-known A1, A2, A3, and A4 formats, including the waterfall autotiles that were skipped by eishiya’s and devium’s scripts. I also added templates for several subsets of those – it’s not uncommon for people to post an autotile chunk that’s expected to be pasted into some part of an A sheet, so I thought it’d be nice if this extension can just directly load such things.
If anyone wants to try it out, the script can be downloaded from my repository; the layouts are also in the repository. Note that these refer to images that don’t exist in the repository – for the purpose of the extension script that doesn’t matter, but it does mean you can’t just open them up in Tiled and look at them unless you have an image that you can use as a substitute for the broken link.
In addition to building a tile layout that Tiled can use, this extension even adds terrain sets and animations. If you don’t like the way it adds them, you can (provided you have a viable image to substitute) easily open up the template tilemap and paint the terrains differently.
I also created another extension script that might be useful for people who want to make custom layouts to use with this extension – the Shift Brush script takes the current brush and shifts all the tiles in it by some offset in the tileset. Due to API limitations (there is no way to get the current width of the tileset view as far as I know), it currently only works on tilesheet-based tilesets.