Remex: a tool to use autotiles from RPG Maker in Tiled

[Rastagong Librato]

Hi folks,

I wanted to show you a little something I have programmed, Remex. It's a tool for game developers which facilitate the use of RPG Maker VX /VX Ace autotiles outside this software: Remex turns the compact autotiles from RPG Maker into large readily-usable grids of 48 tiles, with all their possible shapes. With Remex, it becomes possible to use the many resources for RM available on the Internet in your own game engines.

But there's another feature. Remex can make rulemaps for Tiled out of these autotiles, so that you can map in Tiled just like in RPG Maker, without having to put the tiles in a coherent way manually. 

Remex comes both as a GUI and as a command-line tool, so you can use it in your own scripts. 

Remex 0.2 for Windows is already available. It's cross-platform, but I haven't bundled it for Linux yet. It's also a free software (published under the MIT license), so feel free to browse the repo or to download the sources.

A few screenshots:

Autotile expander screen

An expanded autotile

Remex makes it easier to automap in Tiled

Hope you will enjoy it,

Rastagong

[Rastagong Librato]

Sorry, the link to the 0.2 version for Windows was wrong, here it is.

[Tayete]

I think it is a great idea! But, won't it become obsolete with Tiled autotiles in the future?

Tatere

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[Rastagong Librato]

Oh, I didn't know that the automapping would change again in Tiled. Well, Remex will be useful until then, I guess.

Rastagong

[Thorbjørn Lindeijer]

On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 6:33 PM, Rastagong Librato <rayma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Le lundi 5 novembre 2012 09:38:46 UTC+1, tayete a écrit :
>> I think it is a great idea! But, won't it become obsolete with Tiled
>> autotiles in the future?
>

> Oh, I didn't know that the automapping would change again in Tiled. Well,
> Remex will be useful until then, I guess.

The terrain tool doesn't and probably never will make the automapping
functionality obsolete. For that, the automapping functionality is way
too flexible whereas the terrain tool has a lot of limitations.
However, for basic terrain drawing the terrain tool will probably be
preferred over the use of automapping rules.

But currently the terrain tool doesn't really support RPG Maker
terrains. This is because they are rather special. They seem to be
intended for editing in 32x32 pixel blocks but the transitions are
actually 16x16 tiles. This means some terrains could work with the
Tiled terrain tool when used as 16x16 tiles, but filled area in the
middle will often be problematic since they would need to repeat a 2x2
block of tiles (so this area also always needs to be an even number of
tiles).

Remex solves this problem by blowing up the tileset to make it a 32x32
tileset containing all the combinations. It's a bit sad to use 8 times
the needed texture space, but we got plenty to waste these days and it
works. It still won't work with the terrain tool though, which is
built around the idea of assigning a terrain to each corner so it
expects 16 tiles for transitioning between any two terrains (though it
also supports tiles consisting of more than two terrains).

It would be possible to derive these 16 rather than 48 different 32x32
tiles for use with the terrain tool, but that would be at the cost of
flexibility compared to the original tileset.

I think ideally in this case, a variation of the terrain tool could be
written that works with the RPG Maker system. The map on which this
operates would need to use 16x16 tiles and the tool would need apply
the necessary restrictions.

Best regards,
Bjørn

[Kawika Heftel]

Where might one find out exactly how to use the Terrain tool?  I'm very interested in learning how it works.

[Thorbjørn Lindeijer]

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 4:24 AM, Kawika Heftel <kaw...@heftelstudios.com> wrote:
> Where might one find out exactly how to use the Terrain tool? I'm very
> interested in learning how it works.

You can try it out with the example maps "desert" and
"isometric_grass_and_water", which have been set up with the right
information (in desert.tsx and embedded in
isometric_grass_and_water.tmx respectively). Looking at the files with
a text editor might explain how to set it up for your own tilesets.

I'm still working on the UI to edit this information (see my
wip/terrainedit branch). My plan is to finish that before the 0.9
release, and when it's done I also hope to write a bit of
documentation about it.

Best regards,
Bjørn

[Kawika Heftel]

Thanks!

[Thorbjørn Lindeijer]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:25 PM, Kawika Heftel <kaw...@heftelstudios.com> wrote:
> Thanks!

You're welcome. :-)

Btw, meanwhile I've "finished" the terrain editing UI and pushed it to
the master branch. There are still some tweaks to be made but overall
it should be usable.

Since it's pushed to master you may also be able to use a daily build
rather than compiling it yourself, depending on your platform.

Best regards,
Bjørn

[Kawika Heftel]

That would be awesome (being able to use a daily build), since I'm on
windows and though I'm a programmer by trade, I don't really have a
setup for compiling tiled from source.

Thanks,

Kawika Heftel
801-471-0514
http://heftelstudios.com

On Dec 6, 2012, at 3:20 PM, "Thorbjørn Lindeijer"

[Thorbjørn Lindeijer]

Hey Kiwaka,

Did the daily build work for you? I'm curious how the terrain stuff is working out.

Best regards,
Bjørn

Op 6 dec. 2012 23:50 schreef "Kawika Heftel" <kaw...@heftelstudios.com> het volgende:

[Rocks]

Terrific! I am looking for something like this for long time, thanks a lot!

Rocks

在 2012年11月6日星期二UTC+8上午7时06分48秒，Thorbjørn Lindeijer写道：

[Mandisa W]

Hi, this is just the "bridge" tool I was searching for! I'm wondering though how difficult it would be to expand Remex to accept both RPG Maker XP-style autotiles and VX ones. There are a significant amount of community resources available that are in the RMXP format, which is still based around 32x32 tiles with 16x16 "borders", but is expanded a bit differently.

RMVX: (64x96 autotile)

inner corners -- outer corners
------------------------------------------
64 x 64 texture "square"


RMXP: (96x128 autotile)

inner corners -- external texture -- outer corners
------------------------------------------
96 x 96 texture "square"

I've been poking around with expanding autotiles manually via Photoshop, but without PS scripting, it looked to be tedious work. I'm not a Python programmer (Java's my main go-to), but if there's any info/assistance I can provide, just let me know.

[Rastagong Librato]

Hi,

OP here. Sorry for the lack of replies, everybody. And thanks for having a look at Remex! I didn't think it would catch anyone's eye. I'll try to carry on with the development then, and especially to port it to Linux and Mac (at last).

Hi, this is just the "bridge" tool I was searching for! I'm wondering though how difficult it would be to expand Remex to accept both RPG Maker XP-style autotiles and VX ones. There are a significant amount of community resources available that are in the RMXP format, which is still based around 32x32 tiles with 16x16 "borders", but is expanded a bit differently.

It's definitely possible to make Remex handle RMXP tiles too. I'll do it. In the meantime, if you need an autotile expander for RPG Maker XP, you should try this one : http://www.hbgames.org/forums/viewtopic.php?style=26&f=179&t=71035&p=739465. It only runs on Windows, it's not open source, but oh well, it'll do the work. You'll have to wait for a Remex release if you want to automap in Tiled though.

To Bjørn :

Thanks for the explanations about the terrain tool! I played around with it on the example map (desert.tmx). I find it great: it stores the different combinations in a very compact yet comprehensible format. The key seems to be the width of the autopatterns (they're spread over two 32*32 tiles). However, there's a downside: it's impossible to design a single-tile-wide path, because in a game, the characters wouldn't be aligned with the path (they would likely be positioned at the left top edge of the tiles). By the way, do you plan to add an automapping feature for the non-terrain tiles? For now, only the terrain tile (the sand) is automapped with the mouse, and one has to map roads manually or to fill an area with road tiles and then to empty it with the terrain tool. 

As for the RPG Maker graphics integration, it seems doable, but kinda complicated. RPG Maker has always used 32*32 tiles, and designing maps with 16*16 would require twice more work on the entire map, even on the areas which aren't automapped. 

Regards,

Rastagong

[Petr Viktorin]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 1:04 AM, Rastagong Librato <rayma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> it's impossible to design a single-tile-wide path, because in a game, the
> characters wouldn't be aligned with the path (they would likely be
> positioned at the left top edge of the tiles)

If I understand correctly what you want do do, you'll want to hold
down Ctrl while drawing.

[Thorbjørn Lindeijer]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 1:04 AM, Rastagong Librato <rayma...@gmail.com> wrote:

> To Bjørn :
> Thanks for the explanations about the terrain tool! I played around with it
> on the example map (desert.tmx). I find it great: it stores the different
> combinations in a very compact yet comprehensible format. The key seems to
> be the width of the autopatterns (they're spread over two 32*32 tiles).
> However, there's a downside: it's impossible to design a single-tile-wide
> path, because in a game, the characters wouldn't be aligned with the path
> (they would likely be positioned at the left top edge of the tiles). By the
> way, do you plan to add an automapping feature for the non-terrain tiles?
> For now, only the terrain tile (the sand) is automapped with the mouse, and
> one has to map roads manually or to fill an area with road tiles and then to
> empty it with the terrain tool.

Right, as Petr pointed out you can do a "road" by holding Ctrl which
will make it only edit one corner at a time rather than a whole tile.
Whether that works alright with character positioning depends on where
you render your character. If you place his sprite on the bottom of
the tile I think it will generally look fine, but if you center him on
the tile he will always be standing on the side of the road.

Manu has worked on support for one-tile-wide roads and fences, but I
think it didn't make it into a usable state yet. It's a feature that
can still be added later.

> As for the RPG Maker graphics integration, it seems doable, but kinda
> complicated. RPG Maker has always used 32*32 tiles, and designing maps with
> 16*16 would require twice more work on the entire map, even on the areas
> which aren't automapped.

Right, I think it would be better to use your Remex tool to expand the
RPG Maker tileset so that you can use it with 32x32 pixel tiles rather
than having to fiddle with 16x16 to get all variations.

Regards,
Bjørn

[Rastagong Librato]

Thank you for both your replies. I had never used the Ctrl key in Tiled, my mistake.

You're right about the characters too. I was thinking of placing the characters at the top left angle only.

Regards,

Rastagong

[exec]

Is there something wrong with the auto mapping generation? Or did something change in Tiled since the last release? I gotta admit I have no clue how the auto mapping systems works yet, but I guess it should still work when generated with Remex^^
This is what it looks like after running auto mapping:

[exec]

Sorry, my mistake. Didn't realize it requires surrounding tiles to work. Thanks for this tool~
Is it possible to make it work at the map border though? Is that a problem with auto mapping, or the generated tiles?