A new game editor

[litearc]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on an editor for creating game resources like sprites, tilesets, and maps. The goal is to let the user create resources in a format that's general enough to be used with any game engine but also have features that are common and useful enough, such as tile-transitions, that it handles them separately. I know there are similar editors out there like Tiled, but there'll be enough differences with this editor to still justify making it. With that said, I'm doing this for personal reasons as well: to learn how to create GUIs, and to create an editor I have full control over.


Dialog to create a new file.

I started with the tileset editor, which allows you to assign properties/values to each tile. There are also "tags", or boolean variables, that you can set for each tile. Tags make it easy to set commonly used booleans to many tiles, i.e. whether a tile is "blocked" or not.


Tile properties editor.


Tile tags editor.

That's all I have done so far - it's not much, but I wanted to see what people thought. I plan on adding editors for maps, sprites, and animations.

One of the goals for the map editor is to handle tile-transitions with no hassle, like in RPG Maker. This is a well-known problem with various solutions:

http://playtechs.blogspot.se/2007/04/ti ... n-tip.html
http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/refe ... le934.html
http://www.saltgames.com/2010/a-bitwise ... g-tilemaps

I wanted to get your opinion on the what you think is the best way to implement tile-transitions. The links above suggest generating transition-tiles for each configuration of neighboring tiles, which I would prefer to avoid. There is another solution (that I'm sure has been talked about) that involves breaking each tile into 4 subtiles and combining them to form any transition-tile. For example, if the original tiles are 16 x 16 pixels, the modified tileset will now have 4 times as many tiles that are 8 x 8 pixels. The user will still edit the map using the original-size tiles, but behind the scenes the editor will work with sets of 4 tiles. I'm not sure how RPG Maker handles it internally. For those of you who've worked with the program, the format of the transition tiles in the tileset image is:



which, if you look closely, actually only has 5 tiles worth of unique information:



This is currently the way I plan on implementing transition tiles in the map editor. The user selects a set of 5 "basis" tiles that will be split and combined as necessary to generate smooth transitions. This may push the map engine harder since it now has to render 4 times as many tiles (even though the tiles are smaller), but I think the tradeoff of not having to generate extra tiles is worth it.

I'll update the topic from time to time as progress is made. In the mean time, let me know what you think.

[Germanunkol]

Interesting! What are you using to make the UI? Is it cross-platform? (I assume so, since you're showing mac-y images...)

This is currently the way I plan on implementing transition tiles in the map editor. The user selects a set of 5 "basis" tiles that will be split and combined as necessary to generate smooth transitions. This may push the map engine harder since it now has to render 4 times as many tiles (even though the tiles are smaller), but I think the tradeoff of not having to generate extra tiles is worth it.

I don't think you'll have any problems if the games end up using sprite batches to draw the map. They're fast enough to draw many sprites at once...

About the transitions: I don't really think it matters much how you do it internally, it will all work. There's two things that DO matter and which will set your editor apart if done right:

• The user should not need to worry about transitions when placing tiles. But there may be times when the user does not want transitions - maybe make a "force no transition" switch of something.
• If at all possible, help the user to auto-generate the transitions. This could involve a couple of tools, like for example: You could let the user load up two textures (grass and dirt) and then auto-generate a transition for them depending on some settings (adjustable by sliders, like amount of grass on dirt tile etc) and maybe some pre-coded transitions (random noise at the edges, straight lines, maybe some outlines at the transitions etc).
  Only the textures which the user has created transitions for would use transition.

Having this feature might have made my life much easier a few weeks ago...

[Roland_Yonaba]

Is it cross-platform?

Yeah, is it ?

[litearc]

@Germanunkol: Right, the user will not have to worry about placing the right transition tile, but there will be a mode (like in RPG Maker), where it doesn't auto-tile. As for auto-generating transitions between different terrains, I think that's beyond the scope of something like this. There's no way I can do a better job than any half-decent pixel artist.

@RolandYonaba: Yes, it is! It's written in Qt. I don't have a windows machine right now, but it shouldn't be hard to get a hold of one. I'll also put up the source so people can compile it themselves.

[SiENcE]

@litearc:

So you want todo something like Automapping in Tiled?

Tiled is Cross-Platform and a very good Tileeditor also done in QT. It's worth a look and it also has plugin support.