Beta: Tile Map

Welcome to our brand new Clickteam Community Hub! We hope you will enjoy using the new features, which we will be further expanding in the coming months.

A few features including Passport are unavailable initially whilst we monitor stability of the new platform, we hope to bring these online very soon. Small issues will crop up following the import from our old system, including some message formatting, translation accuracy and other things.

Thank you for your patience whilst we've worked on this and we look forward to more exciting community developments soon!

Clickteam.

    Nice! It's working well, but how come on the level editor, when testing, the X coordinate doesn't update past half the screen? It collides correctly and shows the Y coordinate correctly, but it doesn't update the X after the middle of the screen. :\

    Working as fast as I can on Fusion 3

    LB: OHH, sorry, that was me playing around with some settings. Basically the problem is that the frame is bigger than the screen and MMF follows the player. But Tile Map is fixed on-screen and "Follow MMF camera" is unchecked, so it won't move. Derp.

    Quote from Jakinbandw

    Well, it doesn't work in MMF2Dev Build 253. It can't load the Tilemap.mfx


    Gah, sorry! I compiled a debug version, you need a special debug runtime for that.

    I fixed both issues and uploaded a new version! Sorry.

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    Edited once, last by Looki (May 7, 2012 at 12:12 AM).

    Quote from Looki

    ...It is possible to put the Tile Map above an Active right now, but you can't do both behind and above at the same time with one instance....

    I think you might like this extension.

    I think I will! Even with two instances of the object I'm sure it'll save memory compared to hundreds of "Add Backdrops."

    Quote from Looki

    ...This basically means each layer has one basic tileset that you can use. We agreed that specifying a tileset ID for every single tile is an advanced feature and should not be needed by most of you...

    Oh no! This is exactly what I need! While I would normally agree that 1 tileset per layer is fine, my current project is a bit more advanced. Most games have level themes such as "forest" or "lava" which works fine with that method. My project treats tiles more like materials such as wood, steel, bedrock, coal, etc. These tiles need to be available across many level themes.

    So individual tile ID's is a must for me. :)
    But you said that this should be possible with certain conditions, so I'll try it out first. I'll have to get back to it later because I'm not at my MMF workstation.

    A thousand thank-you's for this amazing extension.

    ~ James O.

    Cool :) Yves confirmed that it's pretty much impossible to draw over and below an Active in one object, so I'll try to add in some kind of way to link two Tile Maps together. This should be possible. You'll have to wait a while for the tileset ID thing, I guess!

    Oh btw, the map format is not final. Maps you save right now probably won't be compatible with newer versions of the extension!

    Note: I noticed that the extension performs badly in HWA - Please don't report this bug. I've fixed it (but only if you uncheck "transparent").

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    Edited 2 times, last by Looki (May 7, 2012 at 10:50 PM).

    I have tested this now and it seems to work great so far and this will be very useful for any tile based games i make, thanks Looki. :D

    Edit - I also like the idea about tile alterables/attributes so you could tag a certain tile as grass, sand or stone etc. That type of option would be great for RPG games where the battles depend on the tile.

    Edited once, last by Atom (May 8, 2012 at 2:50 PM).

    I'm really loving it so far! I can really see the potential here. Writing a level editor in only a handful of lines is amazing. I wish I had this about a month ago. =P

    You said that HWA works but is a little slow. I have another HWA problem.
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    With HWA on, the levels draw in black & white. Collisions don't work as well, and my little guy falls into oblivion. Everything works great in Standard mode though.

    As for level format compatibility, why not allow the extension to save maps as bitmaps, like the old Doom games? I believe Grand Theft Auto used this method too. I'm currently using some Surface objects to save map data as PNG images, which I then send to my artist (on a Mac) who can edit the maps in Photoshop too. It uses the RGB data to represent tiles.

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    Red is the tile, Green is the tileset, and Blue is any other data. Thats the format I'm using right now.

    PNG offers some of the best file compatibility across many OS and programs. Of course a proprietary compressed file format is most ideal for distribution, but during edit time (when the file format may change a lot) its good to have a common-ground format that is easily convertible.

    The Tile IDs and HWA compatibility would be ideal, but no pressure or anything. Otherwise its perfect. I'll be messing around with this extension in my free time to see what I can do with it as it is.

    ~ James O.

    Hmm, I will add Surface interaction, so you could basically use Surface to load and save image files.

    I know collisions don't work in HWA, thanks. But that black & white issue seems odd - an MFA would be great, but HWA support isn't on top of my list right now :)

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    Competition increases productivity! :D I hope to release a new beta soon... one with Flash. Still need some time though!
    Implemented Surface interaction, btw. Saves me the trouble of having to implement features like Flood fill, line drawing etc. :D

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    Flash will take a while I'm afraid. I'm currently unable to work with the necessary development software.

    We've decided to split up the extension into two single ones:

    The 'Tile Map', which handles all the data: You load map files, manage tilesets and the layers with their tiles.
    And then there's the 'Tile Map Viewport', which is basically what Tile Map does as well, right now: Render the level. You attach a Viewport to a Tile Map to render its content. This has several advantages. It's better design. If an action is in the Tile Map object, you'll know that the setting will be stored in saved map files. Plus, you can do things like split-screen easily - or, as someone requested earlier, have a layer above and behind the player :) A beta should be coming within the next 24 hours.

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    I'm working on a similar engine at the moment. The limitations that I'm aware of are: tiles don't exist when they're off screen, so you can't test for enemy platform collisions or do enemy path-finding when they leave the screen... the enemy is basically frozen until they re-enter the game frame. And 2) You need to load the whole map and all textures into memory, which can become large in itself if you're trying to do something like a 2D Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto.

    I'm working towards dynamically loading the map and new textures from hard drive files as the player approaches new zones, ie. I can store the whole map in 128x128 zones and load 4 of these zones on startup, placing the player in the centre of this 2x2 zone grid. Then I unload from the left and load to the right whenever the player walks 128 tiles from left to right... This is the only way I can picture a truly unlimited map with no load times... well, only limited by the hard drive space.

    Any thoughts on implementing this?

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    Edited once, last by Ryan (May 17, 2012 at 4:33 AM).

    Basically, I think that advanced programmers should be able to implement this themselves in the extension. You'll be able to "paste" map files into the current map. So you'd basically start off with an empty map and keep filling it. You can also load and unload tilesets at wish - so it should be possible. I can see why you want it, but it's not something that I want to spend time on, because it's a bit complicated, you know - and while I want this to be a cool extension, I can't spend that much time on features that I'm not being paid for :) Besides, you can load huge tile maps without having to worry about memory or anything... as I stated earlier. Even if you were to have maps as big as 2000x2000 tiles, you'd still be in an 8 MB range. And I dare say that MMF games eat quite a bit anyway. It's not the most efficient approach for sure, though.

    Btw, JimJam, this one's for you <3
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    New beta.

    All older MFAs and saved tile map files are now broken.

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    Changes:

    More expressions.
    More actions, specifically ones related to the "cursor". You can now exchange data with Surface, for example.
    Changed file format, allows me to add stuff later without breaking compatibility.
    Split up extension into two parts, data handling and viewport.

    I'll make some new examples, I guess, but it shouldn't be too hard to get started.
    Put an instance of both extensions into the frame.
    Start of frame: Assign viewport (select the viewport object)
    Then, all you need to do is add a layer and set tiles. The default tileset is 0, which is the first one - you can add them in the properties of the Tile Map extension or load them manually via actions. Hope this was enough to get started!

    Known bugs:
    HWA issues
    Collision issues when having 2 instances of a viewport object

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