[tiled-user] [Patch] Tile Instance Properties

[Christian Henz]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 04:19:28PM +0200, Bjørn Lindeijer wrote:
> On 6/24/06, Christian Henz <chrhenz at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Maybe a quick solution would be to display a little "P" on top of all
> > relevant cells whenever the dialog is active.
> 
> Something like that. I also like Adam's idea, which is similar. A
> problem would still be the per-layer nature of the properties. Maybe
> we could do something like a stack of little icons when properties are
> used on multiple layers.
> 

Or really just show the indicators for the current layer, because you can
only select those cells anyway.

> > I think zone properties would not conflict with the cell properties
> > and could even be fitted into the existing scheme:
> >
> > <tileproperties>
> >   <cell> [...]
> >   <zone> [...]
> > </tileproperties>
> 
> That's interesting.
> 

It depends on how zones are implemented and what other things they
really represent.

This layout would make it convenient for game engines to apply 
all the propertries to a layer's cells at once.

Having the zones defined somewhere and their properties elsewhere
could also make it more difficult to keep them in sync, since you'd
have to introduce some kind of referencing in the xml data.

So there would also be arguments for managing zones completely
seperate. They *could* also be implemented via objects, since 
you are working "above the layer" anyway :-)

> > Yes, a proper notification mechanism is needed. I'll look through the
> > code some more to see how to do this. Would you agree with the
> > approach I mentioned before (making marqueeSelection persistent)?
> 
> That's probably a good idea. On a sidenote, I plan to look into making
> the selection code more efficient by not extending SelectionLayer from
> TileLayer. Currently the selection is maintained both as an area and
> an array of tiles. However I still have to see whether getting rid of
> the array of tiles will really make things more efficient.
> 

Agreed.

> > I think that this is actually a very common feature in map editors,
> > at least those that I've seen all had something like it.
> 
> Can you link or name some of those? In specific I'm interested in how
> those editors integrated this feature in their user interface.
> 

Maybe I should not have said that, since I have not really used that 
many editors before ;-)  There were two or three that I used back in 
my old Win95 days and that I don't remember the names of... they were 
rather limited tough, with either a set of pre-defined flags 
(like "walkable") or an integer parameter field per cell. 

Since I discovered Tiled, I have not really looked much at other recent 
editors :-)

Cheers,
Christian