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[quixoticproject]

Hey everyone,
for our current game Blockadillo we used a variation of the wang tiles technique to create interesting backgrounds, walls and other stuff. I made a little infographic on how we did that and thought you might be interested!

You can find the whole thing here.

Below is a little teaser:

[bdsowers]

This looks good. Is your algorithm actually using color matching like your infographic suggests, or are you just adding little metadata bits to each tile? it seems like a color matching approach would be needlessly complex.

[quixoticproject]

In my code I have an array which contains which color each side of each tile has. Color is encoded as a simple int. Even a boolean would be enough in this case since our tilesets uses only two colors.

This information is then processed at the start of the level editor into three arrays: rightNeighbour, topNeighbour, topRightNeighbor which are basically look up tables that are used to query potential fitting neighbour tiles.

Since we use this algorithm only at level creation time I never worried about performance, beauty or other things. It just works

[Boreal]

This is a really nice idea!  Would work especially well with rotatable and colourable tiles, I think, to explode the number of possible combinations.

[bdsowers]

This is a really nice idea!  Would work especially well with rotatable and colourable tiles, I think, to explode the number of possible combinations.

Indeed, though I think you'd need to attach more metadata for rotation & colorization to work well. Like if Tile X gets colorized to color Y, its sides then become colors A,B,C,D. Or if you do a rotation, you may want to change the 'colors' instead of simply rotating them, depending on your tiles.

Or maybe I'm just overthinking it. That's a possibility.

[BorisTheBrave]

I think part of the appeal of wang tiles is you need a fairly small number of tiles before you are guaranteed a tiling. Doing every combination of tiles misses this aspect, though I think it was a good tutorial.

[oahda]

Useful!