Terrain tool feedback, round three

Hey! I only just noticed that the Wang functionality was merged into the terrain tool a couple releases ago, and the combination is definitely a vast improvement! I’ve been playing around with it a bit, and here are some obscure snags I’ve run across. I intend this not as criticism, but as a list of weird stuff people might try to do in practice. :slight_smile:


One: It’s not possible to draw a single unconnected tile. This is no big surprise, as there is no way to assign a color to the center of a tile. And it makes sense for the original design of the terrain tool, which was for transitions between different terrain on a top-down map. But for a platformer, where most terrain is interested in transitioning to empty space, single tiles make perfect sense.


Two: I don’t know if there’s a way to enforce decorative edging when transitioning to empty space. I have a blob set of dirt tiles, with grassy bits along the top edges, assigned like so:

image

If I draw with the green terrain, I can make a row of connected blocks, but of course nothing taller than that. If I try to draw with the red terrain, I get some odd suggestions:

image image

It will never propose two connected grass tops, nor propose the grass itself. I was expecting something like this:

image

I also can’t draw the dirt version of these tiles and then use the terrain tool to place the grass on top:

I don’t have grassy-topped versions of every possible open-topped tile, so some arrangements really are impossible to satisfy (which has been a problem with my automap rules for this, too). But this seems fairly straightforward, so I’m confused as to what’s going wrong. My best guess is that empty space is special-cased to only work when there’s a single terrain in a set?


Three: I tried out an arrangement of generic non-trademarked plastic building bricks, like so:

There are no top and bottom edges marked because there’s a seam there, so any tile can go with any other tile. (It could be nice to prevent two blocks of the same color from touching, but I can’t see any way to encode that without allowing an edge to be multiple colors.)

The terrain tool seems to get a little confused about this. If I drag from left to right, I sometimes get broken bricks:

image

I’m guessing what’s happening here is that the middle block was previously red, and I’m trying to place more red as tile 4, but there is no red/red tile, so Tiled has to change tile 3. It randomly picks blue/red, but that would make tile 2 be blue/blue, which doesn’t exist, so it has to change that, randomly picks yellow/blue, and refuses to go any further away from the cursor.

That makes sense. But I don’t specifically want to place red; I just want to place something. I thought that was the general idea behind Wang tiles, but I don’t think there’s a way to draw “any terrain in this set”.

If tiles’ centers could be colored, I could assign the center of all of these tiles to a fifth color (white?), and then draw with that as a workaround.


Four: Similarly, floodfilling or shape drawing with this non-Lego set has curious results:

Not quite what I had in mind. :slight_smile:


Five: I do also have some decorative top-edge tiles for this set, but the correct one to use depends on the edge colors and the color of the brick below, and I have no idea how I could possibly encode that. A correct arrangement would look like this:

I can make automap rules for this easily enough, of course, but those can’t erase decor that’s no longer necessary.


Six: Oh, and I’d love an “edit tileset” button or similar for the map’s terrain list, similar to the tile grid!

Ah, I’ve made another terrain with decorative edging, but this time with all eight corners + edges available, and it seems to work fine. Interesting!