Reference tiles or images for object placement

[Ryan Burrell]

Greetings all! We've been using Tiled to create rooms and place objects for inclusion into our random level generation, and it has worked very well for this. However, one major issue we've never been able to get around is that Tiled doesn't have a way to map tiles to an object, or to associate an external image with an object to be loaded in for preview. We use the objects as reference points for the game engine to then spit out crates, traps, enemies, items, you name it... but having to rely on purely color differences to denote what type of object it is can be detrimental to the workflow. 

I know you can insert tiles on object layers, but the problem is that Tiled seems to limit this to a single tile from your texture sheet meaning that we can't use it to associate larger (or smaller) reference images for placement. Does anyone know if there's a way to get around this? It would be perfect if an object simply allowed you to reference tiles from a texture sheet or even just link to an external single image - this is just for preview purposes after all.

I was going to submit a feature request but wanted to make sure I hadn't missed a feature somewhere that lets us do this type of thing. Thanks for any help!

- Ryan

[Thorbjørn Lindeijer]

Hey Ryan,

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:32 PM, Ryan Burrell
<ryan.b...@pixelscopic.com> wrote:
> I know you can insert tiles on object layers, but the problem is that Tiled
> seems to limit this to a single tile from your texture sheet meaning that we
> can't use it to associate larger (or smaller) reference images for
> placement. Does anyone know if there's a way to get around this? It would be
> perfect if an object simply allowed you to reference tiles from a texture
> sheet or even just link to an external single image - this is just for
> preview purposes after all.
>
> I was going to submit a feature request but wanted to make sure I hadn't
> missed a feature somewhere that lets us do this type of thing. Thanks for
> any help!

Check out the wip/tile-images branch from the Tiled git repository. It
contains some changes that allow leaving a tileset empty on creation
and then adding/removing individual images to it later (using buttons
on the tool bar below the tileset view). These images can have
different sizes and can of course be used as tile objects.

It's not merged into master yet because I'm not sure whether the UI is
intuitive like this. It's not exactly clear that it's possible to
create an empty tileset, as well as it not being clear that when you
base a tileset on a single image that you then can't add/remove
individual tiles. At the moment I'm not really sure how to solve these
issues, but maybe you could give some initial feedback.

Best regards,
Bjørn

[Ryan Burrell]

Awesome, thank you! We'll check that out. I hope it gets added to the main branch at some point because that's about the only thing I feel Tiled is still missing to make it the perfect tool for our workflow (and probably others' as well). Otherwise the features it has are marvelous.

P.S. Nested / tree-view object properties would be a huge win as well.

- Ryan