I’ve been doing a lot of reading of past posts about embedded tilesets-- will they continue to be supported? I read a post from January 2018 and Bjorn stated that he hoped to fade them out by Tiled 1.3… Since that update has come and gone and embedded tilesets are still here, can I assume they’ll stick around? Obviously, I’m asking because my project already uses them, and I’m wondering whether I should switch over to separate tilesets or not. Thanks!
Hey @shoris, welcome to the Tiled forum!
I would definitely like to remove support for embedded tilesets, because they make the UI and implementation more complicated for very little benefit. But I’m not sure if that will ever happen. I would say it is at least guaranteed to always remain an option to embed tilesets on export.
I do think there are good reasons to switch to external tilesets:
- You have to set up the tileset parameters only once.
- If you set any tile properties, add terrain information, collision shapes or use animated tiles, all this information will be automatically shared between all maps using this tileset.
In contract, I think the only benefit of using embedded tilesets is that your map loader is a bit easier to write since it does not need to open additional files. Though, it can also matter if files are loaded over HTTP for a browser game. In either case, embedding tilesets on export is a good alternative.
Thanks for the reply! Good to know, I guess I’ll attempt to switch over to external tilesets. When you say on export, do you mean as an exported image?
Export in this context means using Tiled’s export feature instead of Save. This allows applying settings to your map files that may differ from your working file. It’s a common (though of course not universal) practice to keep separate working files and production/game-ready files, and the Export feature facilitates that.
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