[Hajo]

Introduction

Tilemaster is a simple tile set editor and drawing tool. At the moment it is in an early stage of development, but the basic functionality to manage tile sets and draw tiles is there. There is definitely room for expansion, though.

Similar to my Itemizer application, this allows to edit a number of tile attributes, add new attributes or remove no longer needed ones. File formats are not entirely fixed yet, but I'll try to keep futures versions compatible to the current ones, or provide easy upgrade paths.

Tilemaster needs the Java runtime version 6 or newer installed to be run and uses the new new Nimbus look and feel.

Project Site

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilemaster/

UI Preview

Sourceforge scaled it down to fit into 640x480 pixels ...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilemaster/screenshots/330669

Download

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilemaster/files/

Features

- Loading and saving of tile sets
- Import of PNG files into tile sets
- Export of PNG files from tile sets
- Import of tiles from other tile sets
- Import/Export of tile sheets
- Bitmap/sprite editor
- Edit tile attributes (meta data editor)
- Resize tile sets
- Reorder tiles in a set while keeping the tile IDs
- Insert and remove tiles from sets dynamically
- Zooming and panning the painting area
- White and black point RGB adjustment transforms
- Support for background images or tiles
- Includes a simple color palette editor
- Loading and saving of color maps
- IO plugin support
- Painting tool plugin support
- Rectangular and isometric tiling previews (works for hex tiles, too)

Tilemaster allows to edit true color images. The color palette can be edited to create palettes that have more suitable colors for a particular project (right click a color to open the color editor).

Documentation

I lost most of the documentation that I had written, but could salvage a few parts and some day hope to write more:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tilemaster/index.php?title=Main_Page

Edit: I've marked all the old defunct link targets in this thread with "[link lost]" now. What is left from the old documentation is in the Wiki on Sourceforge now.

[tcaudilllg]

So basically, I can create an attribute like "poisonous" for a tile made with this thing, and load it into a game?

I like the features. Lots of features. Probably the most serious tile editor around. Yeah I can have fun with this.

[Hajo]

From a designers point of view I'd say it's better to have the tiles as images only, and use the item data to keep the gameplay related attributes.

But Tilemaster allows you to give each tile some attributes, string and integer values. These will be saved in the *.tica files and can be read from other applications. Or you write a plugin that exports directly into a format that you can use in your game.

To add a poison level, click the "Add new attribute" button in the integer panel, label it "Poisonous", and enter values from 0 (no poison) to whatever the max poison level will be in your game.

At the moment I use Tilemaster mostly as a drawing tool and to manage groups of small images, and I assume this will be the primary use. Tile names, tags and such I use to help my memory - later I want to add functions to search tiles by their attributes, that might help to organize big sets of tiles.

[Malignus]

Cool! Just one question: what is a .tica file?

[Hajo]

The tica files store the tile attribute configuration and tile attribute values. They are plain text files. I've described the format briefly over here:

[link lost]

The tiles themselves are stored as PNG files, and should be easy to access from other tools.

There is a plugin concept to save tiles and tile attributes in other formats. I have packaged an example plugin "SheetIO", which stores tiles as sub-images from a big PNG file - I think such tile sheets are rather common to store tiles. The plugin source is now bundled in the archive (look into the plugin_sources folder), so you can ignore the download link from the message. The rest of the message might be interesting to see what the plugin can do:

[link lost]

[Hajo]

A new version has been released.

Version 0.23, 135kb:
[link lost]

Changes since 0.22a:

- There is now a splitter bar between the painting area and the tile list. This allows to resize the tile list and give it more space of the window.
- Tilemaster now saves windows size, position and the splitter position when closed. It also restores window size, location and splitter position when started again.
- A new painting tool "Anti", which can be used to anti-alias corners and lines. It will replace the pixel by the averaged colors of its 4 neighboring pixels.

[Hajo]

A new version has been released.

Version 0.23a, 132kb:
[link lost]

Changes since 0.23:

- "Insert New Tile" and "Remove Selected Tile" functions to dynamically insert and remove tiles from sets.

Insert will shift the selected tile to the right, insert an empty tile and immediately select the new tile. Remove will remove the selected tile and select the tile that was right of the formerly selected tile.

- Added some tiles to the example tile set. Polished some of the existing example tiles.

[Hajo]

New version released!

Download

Version 0.24, 137kb:
[link lost]

Changes since 0.23a:

If you use background images or background tiles, you can now drag them around under the current tile to adjust positioning. Just hold shift, press the left mouse button and drag the background tile.

Tilemaster will calculate the offset between the dragged background tile and the current tile and store this offset with the tile data. These offsets are also shown right of the "Pos:" label, where the mouse position uses to be shown, too.

The offsets are useful for easy centering of objects on ground tiles. If the tiles are later drawn on top of each other (e.g. in a game that you are making), the rendering code can make use of the offsets, and place the tiles just as you had them positioned in Tilemaster.

It's also useful if you have two tiles which are supposed to be positioned in a relative way, e.g. a truck and a trailer, and you want to see a preview how this combination will look like. Just make one of them the background tile, and drag it until it fits to the other.

Updated Tile Data Structure

The tile data structure got a new version (v.2) to keep track of the tile offsets:

[link lost]

There is a minor problem that shift-dragging disturbs the color selection of the palette. It's not a big issue, just select the right color again before continuing to paint. I hope to fix this in one of the next releases.

Updated Background Tile Tutorial

The background tile tutorial got a new section explaining how to drag a background tile.

[link lost]

[tcaudilllg]

Given the plug-in functionality in your tools, it would be possible to say, implement a programming language which could interface with the tool directly, am I right?

[Hajo]

I think so. The plugins are called only on certain operations (loading, saving to files with a given extension) but what the plugin does then, is fully left to the plugins implementation. You can as well call an interpreter for a script from within such a plugin and let it do all kinds of magic.

I want to have painting tool plugins for Tilemaster, too, but haven't found a good way to integrate such into the UI.

[Hajo]

New version released!

Download

Version 0.27, 142kb:
[link lost]

Changes since 0.26:

Support for painting tool plugins. They will go into the rightmost tab of the painting tools, and be displayed by name in a list.

There are two example painting tool plugins bundled. One that draws X shapes, and one that draws isometric style <> shape tiles. I'm not sure how useful these are, but they should serve their purpose as plugin examples. In another forum someone had asked for more isometric style painting functions, so maybe the diamond tool is useful even.

The plugin sources are bundled as well, also a script to compile all the plugins from their sources.

[tcaudilllg]

These are some great tools.

[Hajo]

I've published a new version. Actually only small changes, but maybe helpful. A task that I often faced was to adjust lightness and also hue for newly imported tiles to match the rest of the set. There are now two transform included, called "White Point" and "Black Point" which can be used for such adjustments. I used terms from video technology, basically they mean which "intensity" of signal will become white and black on the display. The transforms adjust these levels.

Some examples how to use these transforms (only text, some day I'll add screenshots):
[link lost]


And the original announcement with download links for Tilemaster 0.28:
[img]http://www.funkelwerk.de/forum/Smileys/default[link lost]

[Hajo]

Tilemaster is now also open source, GPLed and on Sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilemaster/

It's hard to reconstruct tutorials and FAQs if all you have is a giant SQL dump of the old forum database :I But I managed to salvage a few tutorials, and I hope that I can restore more:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tilemaster/index.php?title=Main_Page

If you just want a quick preview what Tilemaster was/is looking like, try this link:
http://sourceforge.net/dbimage.php?id=313903

[Hajo]

I've released a new version, v0.29. It got one bugfix, and an updated UI:

- Endless loop in tiling preview for tile raster 0x0 is fixed.
- Better button texts for some painting and color tools.
- v0.29 uses the "Nimbus" look and feel by default

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilemaster/

Also, I could restore some of the most important howtos and info pages:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tilemaster/index.php?title=Main_Page