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[Bad Sector]

Ok, i mentioned Slashstone Mapas, my 2D tile map editor a bunch of times in threads from those who needed a tile map editor. However in all these cases the common part was: ...but you need to compile it. So i decided that this shouldn't be the case any more and people should get binaries. And as a plus, Slashstone Mapas got a bunch of new features and most holes from previous versions were filled. The binaries can be downloaded from the site above, near the source code from SVN.

Also here is a new screenshot of the program:


And a video showing the editor in a small quick video tutorial (flash): click here to see

Some notable new features are:
* Relations! You can 'draw' relations between tiles and give them a name. How you use them, depends on your engine but imagine drawing an arrow from a monster to a key and naming it 'drop'. Your engine can parse this and make the monster drop the key once killed. Instead of imaging it, just see the editor :-). Use Alt+left-click-drag to make a relation.
* TWO exporter plugins. One exports a simple map format which contains the whole map data using predefined IDs for each image (so you can share it between tools). The other exports a very simplistic format which uses the names of the images. So basically it looks like:

rock rock rock rock grass grass grass rock rock grass gras ..
rock rock gem rock rock grass grass tree grass rock ...
...

I believe this is the easiest to parse. If not, well the exporter's code is documented so it can be used as a base/example for writing your own exporter plugin.
* More precise zooming and now you can zoom out more than 100%. That is you can see the map in 50% zoom, 45% zoom, etc (before you could only zoom in, not zoom 'out').
* Finally bothered to add scrollbars in the tile lists :-P
* Custom flags for each tile. Ctrl+Click shows the flag dialog. A plugin can modify the flag names.
* Popup menu with additional options. Ctrl+Right-click shows the popup menu. One option deletes all relations associated with the tile and another replaces all instances of the tile with random tiles selected from the active tiles box.
* More stuff i don't remember.


Comments? Suggestions? Bugs?

[Skofo]

Oh wow, this could actually be pretty damn useful. A standard map editor where you can easily design maps and export/compile them into a readable format could be used by a lot of people. This is a nice start! I love the relations and flag system.

Some suggestions:
- It needs to have the ability to import tilesets from a single image, as that is usually the most common tile format. Something Game Maker-esque would be useful.
- You should let it change the tile size and use any amount of different tile sizes, as not all games are tiled with square blocks. It might arbitrarily be better practice to use the same size blocks to tile games, but nonetheless some people don't, and the ability change the size of tiles in this would be useful.
- I'm not sure what .mapas files or exported map files look like because I had trouble finding a folder of 24x24 tiles, but here is a suggestion for another method of exporting files. You could let it export into XML format. It is standard and it would give more freedom to give more complex functions in your editor. For example, you could make it so that if the map editor sees a straight line or block of tiles, instead of making a separate elements for each consecutive similar tile (ie. <t c="53,69">6</t> <t c="53,70">6</t> ...), you can make it to make it <t c1="53,69" c2="634,683">6</t> or something. Anyway, this is just a random idea thrown in, I'm not sure if you could make something like XML files work practically in a tile map editor. It'd work much better in a Phoenix Wright case editor or something.

EDIT: Yay, random example http://pastebin.com/f6c00915

[Bad Sector]

- It needs to have the ability to import tilesets from a single image, as that is usually the most common tile format. Something Game Maker-esque would be useful.

I'll do that. The tileset manager needs some more work :-)

- You should let it change the tile size and use any amount of different tile sizes, as not all games are tiled with square blocks. It might arbitrarily be better practice to use the same size blocks to tile games, but nonetheless some people don't, and the ability change the size of tiles in this would be useful.

Well, you can change the tile size. By default it is 24x24 because of a bug :-P. If you press the New button (the empty sheet of paper in the toolbar or File->New) it will ask for tile size. The default is 32x32 (initially the program should have used this instead of 24x24), but you can give any value you want. If you don't like 32x32 as a default value, you can edit .mapasrc in your home directory (in Vista is C:\Users\name and in XP it is somewhere in C:\Documents and stuff - search for .mapasrc) using a text editor. The .mapasrc uses the same format as the .mapas files (not the same entries, but the text format is the same).

A current limitation however is that ALL tiles must be the same size. I know, some people use different shapes. It needs a little work to overcome this limitation because i use project.tileWidth and project.tileHeight everywhere (note that the editor although having a first release here today is more than three years old). What i'll try to do is to allow variable sized images BUT the grid will be the defined value you use.

- I'm not sure what .mapas files or exported map files look like because I had trouble finding a folder of 24x24 tiles, but here is a suggestion for another method of exporting files. You could let it export into XML format. It is standard and it would give more freedom to give more complex functions in your editor.

Mapas uses STTD, a small Java library which is the Java port of another library i wrote, badcfg, that loads and saves files that look like:

Code:

foo
{
    bar = "blah"
    baz = "moo"
    {
        lalala = "32"
    }
}

I prefer this format to XML because is more readable in my opinion and easier to parse, yet it allows the same level of flexibility since -like XML- it provides a tree structure (STTD means Simple Text-based Tree-form Data). But Java has more than adequate XML support and a XML exporter should be trivial to implement if really required. I might write one, but it will be a separate download (its a plugin after all).

Btw, here is the someMaps.mapas file show in the video.