Beta: Tile Map

Awesome update. thanks Looki!

Good stuff Looki!

Great update, thanks very much! A few minor notes/suggestions as I near finishing the editor:

1. Retrieving layer visibility state. I already worked around this using properties, but this would be good for when you load the map and have to set the level editor UI to match the visibility state.
2. Making a foreground and background using "set layers to draw," this works well except if the foreground is set to draw a minimum higher than the number of layers, it'll still draw the top layer. This can be worked around, but the workaround might be prone to creating bugs.

Here's what I got so far:

Please login to see this link.

The amount of functionality this extension has, though, makes me want to go a lot further (using sub-layers and tile tinting would allow some exciting stuff)

The properties feature of this would be really good as a standalone, by the way. I've never been able to find a dictionary object for CF2.5, and this functions almost exactly like one. Especially the string/string pairs, and being able to look up values by their keys. In my game, I conceded to using global strings to store custom control strings (since alterable strings on objects are limited to 10.)

dustingunn, you can use key-value strings with the ini object, or associative array object, or a 2D array x object, or even just using a list object with a delimiter.

INI files are very slow to write to (since they modify an external text file.) Associative array does seem to be essentially a dictionary, but it's ancient and I vaguely remember Matt Bumder having very unfriendly licenses for his extensions back in the day. The object even gives a big warning when you add it to scene. List with delimiter would be pretty awkward and probably slow since you'd have to do everything at CF2.5's highest level, and we don't have functions that can return in expressions (at least not easily.)

The setup the Tile Map object has is the nicest I've seen for key/value pairing, is all I'm saying here.

Matt had pay-to-use-commercially and free licences, but the associative array is a free one, and only ancient because it's bug-free. If you want to use a List object, a Function object lets you return an expression from events. Or you could use an Internal List object.
Your call what to pick, and what you like best, but you gave off the impression it was the only object with key-value, so I wanted to set the record straight for future readers.

Hi sorry if the answer to this is obvious but after going through the examples of this extension and reading through the thread I still am lost on how to edit the placement of tiles (I think I need to edit the included .map files but have no idea how to as notepad++ seems to be the wrong tool).

This is good extension.
I have map that is 64000x36000 px big (2000 x 1125 tiles / 32p) with big tileset.
FPS is always over 500+

I made some calculations and it takes 37.5 minutes to get from left corner to right corner on speed 16.
On speed 64 it takes 16.66666667 minutes.

It consumes 403.0 Mb of memory (and 1.3% of CPU)

Here is image of the map on 25% zoom: (Warning: this is big image)
Please login to see this link.

Some other statistics:
Using Direct3D 9,
uses 3-4% of vram,
Map edited using Tiled Map Editor and it's extension
and the map is saved with Base64 (zlib compression),
also the map is 16:9 and divisible by 8 in px,
CPU is i7-6700, gpu GT640-2GB and 8GB of DDR4 memory

Got my level editor functional. Been working on other aspects, but now I'm back on some tile-based aspects. Right now I have a collision layer, and there's about 50 lines which reference colliding in the game. Duplicating these (to have more than 1 collision layer) isn't really viable, so I'm wondering if a tagging system is possible for collision (as in tagging layers,) or an event that is "object collides with any layer" and then make a tile viewport that only renders the range of layers you'd want to collide with. I already have multiple, since one displays foreground layers that go above the player, and that works seamlessly. Also, small suggestion, but it could be useful to be able to retrieve the current map name.

You should really build your app so that collisions apply in logical places, but should you need to detect collisions on different layers, the easiest solution is to have a separate detector object on the layer you want to collision to happen, and always set the position to match your object. It will act as a collision mask on the correct layer, and collisions can resolve naturally.

The programming way to do this is compare positions manually, eg, right of object A > left of object B, but left of object A < right of object B, and handle the event that way. This is how collisions are handled by Fusion under the hood.

I was talking about not having to duplicate code for multiple collision layers. Tile Map layers, not CF2.5 layers.

Hi sorry to bug you but how do you place items using this editor? I don't know how to edit the .map files

I thought collision was bugged, since the colliders seemed to lag 1 frame behind the camera, but it turns out you need to handle all collisions before moving the camera. Even with follow frame ticked, it seems to only move colliders at render time, so you must order the camera movement to be last.

I released my level editor using this (finally.) Here's the workshop:

Please login to see this link.

Here's a tutorial video series if you want to look at some of the features:

Please login to see this link.

PM me if you want a steam key to try it out. I'd just post some here but they'd get stolen by webcrawlers.

I think for features, being able to retrieve a layer's opacity and visibility setting would be handy, but I worked around it easily enough. The main functionality I'd wish for is further collision options, like "collision with viewport object" like just the layers that the viewport is set to render. right now I use one for background and foreground, but it'd be cool to have another one to allow a range of collisions with graphics.