Simple Tiled Implementation - STI v1.2.3.0

[Karai17]

What I am saying is you should be making buildings, trees, bushes, etc objects within the map, not static tiles a part of the map. The map should be terrain.

[Karai17]

tl;dr: Removed physics stuff, I'm accepting pull requests for bug fixes and new features.

After some careful thought, I've decided to remove the Box2D physics integration from STI. In general, physics engines are very heavy for the types of games people are making with STI. Most people I talk to just roll their own collision code or integrate Bump.lua or HardonCollider with STI. The Box2D code added a lot of complexity to STI and virtually no benefit. I want STI to remain simple so I've decided that STI should remain as a Tiled map loader and not try to be a mediocre framework of sorts.

The physics code is available in the 0.12.3.0 and prior releases if you still want to use it, but you will need to port it forward yourself. I highly recommend against using Box2D unless you really know what you are doing. Not because Box2D is bad, but because a physics engine is probably not what you actually need. Unless you do.

The major features currently missing from STI to meet Tiled parity is an adjustment to how Isometric and Staggered maps work, and adding Hexagonal maps. These are features from Tiled 0.11 and I would welcome any help in getting these features in STI. Most of my time is focusing on other projects such as LOVE3D and other such things. I created STI nearly two years ago because at the time I was working on 2D games, but it's not really something I do any more. STI is definitely not a priority for me, but I do want to keep it maintained and up-to-date. I would love to see pull requests and other such contributions to STI to help keep it working with future versions of Tiled. I will of course maintain LOVE compatibility but new features are far from my mind these days.

At the very least I've not had anyone complain that non-ortho maps are sort of broken. I get the feeling that the extreme majority (95%+) of STI/Tiled users work with ortho maps, but I would still like to see the other styles fixed/added at some point. Help would be greatly appreciated. <3

[Karai17]

After some minor backlash and a feature request, I've reinstated the Box2D code... as a plugin! STI now has a plugin system that anyone can write plugins for. It's really simple to use! To write a plugin, simply return a table with a list of functions where the first argument is the map. That's it!

I will kindly ask that if you do end up writing plugins for STI, that you namespace the methods so they won't conflict with other plugins.

Code: Select all

-- db plugin

return {
   db_dragonBall = function(map, arg1, arg2)
      map[arg1] = arg2
   end,

   db_dragonBallZ = function(map)
      map.theme = "CHA-LA! HEAD-CHA-LA!"
   end
}

[Karai17]

Updated the documentation to use LDoc. I significantly improved data descriptions and the likes as well. Check it out!

[Karai17]

Added Hexagonal map support (thanks EntranceJew!) and a proper error message when a map is compressed.

[Karai17]

Pretty big update here. I finally got around to adding full support for the new staggering system in Tiled. STI now properly renders both staggered isometric and hexagonal maps with the staggered axis as either X or Y, and staggered index as even or odd. Woo!

There is definitely a bug in the conversion functions now that I'll need to figure out.

[Karai17]

I've added support for compressed maps to STI. Compression requires you to use LuaJIT (LOVE has this by default) due to the way Tiled compresses its data. zlib and gzip compression require LOVE 0.10.0+ as LOVE 0.9.2 does not have native support for this feature.

[Karai17]

Added support for render order and box2d's sensors using a new "sensor" property (see documentation).

[Karai17]

Pushed an update that fixes some long standing bugs from 2014. Tile Objects and animated Tile Objects now properly take flip flags and rotation into account. box2d plugin has also been updated for these changes. Drawing a two-point line no longer crashes the box2d plugin.

\o/

[Karai17]

Removing a layer now properly removes tile instance and object data from the map. The box2d plugin also removes collision objects.