Map editor dump part 3
Okay this is the tricky tile selection window I designed today. This was a pain I had to keep rethinking what I wanted or needed it to do. A friend is helping me learn about design, so my requirements were to remove tedium from the user and programming complexity for myself. I guess I’ll let the text speak for itself.
Here’s the text:
November 20th 2008:
Tileset pane now will have tabs, with a scrollbar at the bottom for when there are too many tabs for the tileset pane. The first tab is always the tileset creation tab, with new, import, export, etc. Then under that it will have the list of tilesets.
The new tile creation window will allow you to create multiple tiles before going back into the map editor. There will be a file dialog to open image files, and when you select an image it will appear on the left half of the window. There will be scroll bars to let you scroll around a larger image than the source image window. There will also be a preview window smaller on the right. In the preview window are two edit boxes for width and height, which are situated at the top, and two buttons on the bottom, one says use whole image, and the other says grab all tiles. The tiles that are selected are going to be highlighted, and you may click to add or delete it. pre-defined tile names will appear in a list box at the top right, as well as what image they’re connected to. A selector box will appear around the mouse depending on what tile it’s in, and when you switch tiles int he list box, it will also change position of the selector box. The width and height will determine tile sizes, and you may load in more than one image. While the width and height of each tile in the same image must be the same size, the tiles in a different image may have a different size. Also the width and height will be arbitrary as decided by the user. For instance, the user may have rocks at a 32×24 template, where all rocks in this image must be this same size… however a tree image may contains 64×48, and it will add in the tiles from each of these images at their respective sizes. When the user hits the done button all tiles in the set should be available starting from the second tab, in the tileset panel, ready for use.
End of Text.
As you can see I figured it out. The only restriction is that each tile in a single image be the same size as it’s neighbor. They don’t have to be power’s of two or the same width as height. Simply if you have, say, a bunch of rocks in a sprite sheet (fancy term for multiple graphic elements in the same image file), each rock element has to be the same size as it’s neighbors, for instance, say you chose a funky 15×7, all the rocks in that one sprite sheet has to be 15×7. But you can have multiple elements (tiles) in a single tile set, and use multiple images, so that shouldn’t be much of a restriction. I like to call it “size batching” cuz like everything is batching nowadays ;-)
Keith