Requested Features for Terrain Brush

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Ryan Goodman

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Jul 7, 2014, 3:37:43 AM7/7/14

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I'm currently developing a 2D exploration platformer and I really want to use Tiled, unfortunately as much as I love the terrain brush, I was wondering if it would be possible to make some changes to it so that it can be used for a 2D perspective.

The ability to paint your tiles onto the map without needing tiles to be already existing on the map. I know that the terrain brush was made to paint over terrain with the idea of a top down/quarter view in mind, but what about for platformers? This is the type of terrain that I am referencing. Currently, the terrain brush is not set up in such a way that you can effectively paint terrain for platformers because of how the terrain editor handles connections between tiles; interestingly enough, when trying to achieve something like this in Tiled, it flips all the tiles so that the outside tiles all face inwards as opposed to outwards, not sure why this happens.
At the current time, the terrain brush always draws at a set size, and can not draw single tile terrain. I believe this is because the terrain brush is only set up to detect tiles at each corner of a tile instead of also considering the center and right, left, top, and bottom middle of the tiles. Allowing for a total of 9 points of detection would allow users to use much more complex tilemaps and create better maps without having to go and add these kinds of terrain formations in manually (it can be a very slow and very frustrating process). A tile based level editor named DAME allows for these times of detection points as well as "special connections" which could be considered for one tile wide/tall terrain. It uses something similar but calls it a tile matrix and its rather frustrating to try and set up properly the first time around (especially since it isn't well documented)

I understand that some of these might possibly require you to overhaul the terrain brush, or maybe even just throw these features into a new "tile brush" tool or something along those lines, either are possibly very time consuming depending on how you've set everything up. I do believe that these features would be an incredible boon and even encourage more developers to use your program for their 2D sidescrollers. I'm also kind of lazy and don't feel like having to dig through a bunch of poorly documented program with the hopes that I might find one that can do what I need it to do. Thanks for the time Bjørn, I hope you see this as something worthwhile.

Thorbjørn Lindeijer

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Jul 8, 2014, 4:55:08 PM7/8/14

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Hey Ryan,

I'd definitely like to make further enhancements to the terrain brush,
but the main problem for me is that I do not have time for it currently.

Actually your first point, to be able to paint terrain on an empty
layer, should be almost working fine as it is. If you just leave out
any terrain markings where your tiles have none it should realize the
right thing to do. The only problem I'm aware of here is that there is
currently no terrain-aware way to erase tiles in this case.

Apart from that you're right that it should also support single-tile
roads/fences and possibly also a combination of this in which case you
would indeed have 9 points on each tile for defining the terrain. This
leads to so many combinations that it should also be smarter about
looking for "the smallest change" to satisfy the terrain transitions
as well as give up instead of filling the whole map with garbage when
it can't find an exact fit.

Best regards,
Bjørn

On 07.07.2014 09:37, Ryan Goodman wrote:
> I'm currently developing a 2D exploration platformer and I really
> want to use Tiled, unfortunately as much as I love the terrain
> brush, I was wondering if it would be possible to make some changes
> to it so that it can be used for a 2D perspective.
>
>

> - The ability to paint your tiles onto the map without needing

> tiles to be already existing on the map. I know that the terrain
> brush was made to paint over terrain with the idea of a top
> down/quarter view in mind, but what about for platformers? This is
> the type of terrain that I am referencing

> <https://i.imgur.com/fKYdnzl.png>. Currently, the terrain brush is

> not set up in such a way that you can effectively paint terrain for
> platformers because of how the terrain editor handles connections
> between tiles; interestingly enough, when trying to achieve
> something like this in Tiled, it flips all the tiles so that the
> outside tiles all face inwards as opposed to outwards, not sure why

> this happens. - At the current time, the terrain brush always draws

> at a set size, and can not draw single tile terrain. I believe this
> is because the terrain brush is only set up to detect tiles at each
> corner of a tile instead of also considering the center and right,
> left, top, and bottom middle of the tiles. Allowing for a total of
> 9 points of detection would allow users to use much more complex
> tilemaps and create better maps without having to go and add these
> kinds of terrain formations in manually (it can be a very slow and
> very frustrating process). A tile based level editor named DAME
> allows for these times of detection points as well as "special
> connections" which could be considered for one tile wide/tall
> terrain. It uses something similar but calls it a tile matrix and
> its rather frustrating to try and set up properly the first time
> around (especially since it isn't well documented)
>
> I understand that some of these might possibly require you to
> overhaul the terrain brush, or maybe even just throw these features
> into a new "tile brush" tool or something along those lines, either
> are possibly very time consuming depending on how you've set
> everything up. I do believe that these features would be an
> incredible boon and even encourage more developers to use your
> program for their 2D sidescrollers. I'm also kind of lazy and don't
> feel like having to dig through a bunch of poorly documented
> program with the hopes that I might find one that can do what I
> need it to do. Thanks for the time Bjørn, I hope you see this as
> something worthwhile.
>

Ryan Goodman

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Jul 9, 2014, 12:48:34 AM7/9/14

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So you can! I guess I was just mapping out the tiles incorrectly which was messing out how the tiles were displayed when drawn.
Thanks for the response!

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