I am making a little sandbox game for a Monogame engine I am building. It is at the point where I require some larger more complex maps to test. I have downloaded this tile set: Whispers of Avalon: Grassland Tileset | OpenGameArt.org for my testing purposes but am struggling to get the terrain brush running on a few of the textures. Strangely, the grass and dirt terrain brush seem to work fine.
Really banging my head against the wall here and would so much appreciate someone helping me get oriented in Tiled. The program looks amazing and I would love to become very familiar with it as I venture into game dev!
I do not recommend using the Pattern List. Most tilesets are not complete so there will usually be unused patterns. The Pattern List is also missing all the patterns with Empty, which are very commonly used in sidescroller tilesets.
The two patterns you circled are missing in many tilesets. They’re useful for making thin shapes with your terrains, but not necessary, so don’t worry.
There’s nothing wrong that I can see with your terrain. Make sure that when you’re using it, your layer isn’t empty, since you have a grass-rocks terrain set with no way to transition to empty, so Tiled can’t find a valid way to place any of these terrains. Fill the layer with solid grass or solid rocks tiles first with the Bucket Fill, then paint the other thing with the Terrain Brush.
The “64x64” and “96x96” tiles are not large tiles, they’re just sets of multiple 32x32 tiles. If those tiles don’t work as random variants and require being in those patterns, you can use Automapping to replace the incorrect variants with the appropriate one for the current location using the modX/Y and offsetX/Y properties.
Okay thank you. I am going to make sure I’m doing all these tips right again and check back in! Good to know I’m not misunderstanding something here. Do people generally use auto mapping more than a terrain brush? Or they are just indifferent tools with different utility?
Terrains and Automapping are different tools for different needs. Automapping can do most Terrain work as well, but is much more complicated to set up for that purpose, and is best used for the tasks that Terrains, stamps, etc can’t accomplish.
Most people get by without needing to touch Automapping at all. Its purpose is essentially to automate repetitive conditional tasks you’d otherwise do manually. It’s not actually required to put your tiles into patterns, for example - you can use the Bucket Fill to do that, and that may even be preferable in some cases. But, Automapping can be a huge time-saver if you have many tedious tasks that can be described as input → output pairs.
