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[Golds]

Hey, this is a problem that often comes up for me when prototyping 2D games:  I'd really like to use a general purpose external 2D Map editor, but the only ones I can find assume that I want to build levels out of equally sized tiles on a grid (Mappy, for one).

I'd like to see an editor that had grid based editing, but also allowed you to place assets of any size in the map, with some sort of simple exporting format.  Is there anything like this out there?

Edit: It looks like Tiled might do the trick.  But do you guys know of any others?
Edit 2: nikki came across the Gleed2D editor, which looks like a pretty fantastic solution.

[tomka]

hmm you could try repurposing the civ2 map editor? might be legal issues involved there and it doesnt allow objects of a non-fixed size, also you would need to work with the existing tile set but could be used to mock things up fairly rapidly.

Flash generally works wonders for me as a tool-making system. wouldnt take too long to knock up a rudimentary map editing system there and export the data as xml or something.

finally i would also suggest using a spreadsheet program (like m$ excel or google docs spreadsheet). it wouldnt give you graphical feedback but you could fairly quickly whip up some cell based maps there and interpret the data as you want (ie export the csv and use those as your map files).

[nikki]

i haven't seeen such a program.

What do you mean with this "assets of any size in the map" like actors/objects or the terrain itself ? I'm guessing that it'll be hard to find such a software, because the essence of a tile-based editor is well... to build a level out of uniform sized tiles

that said, maybe you could break up thos assets in tilesizes.
or roll your own, it'll take a few hours/days.
or maybe i am reading it wrong and you don't want to use tiles at all and you only need a grid to place things on ??

[Golds]

Rapid Development environments often have a system like this.  One of the reasons Multimedia Fusion 2 was attractive to me for mocking things up was the ability to just drop assets of any size into its room editor, with an optional snap-to-grid.

I could roll my own, but that's a big time sink.  This seems like a common enough problem that some sort of tool should exist to solve

[nikki]

so I assume you don't want to use tiles then..
i had though about MMF2 too, because of the grid.

but whats wrong with MMF2 then if it does what you need for rapid prototyping ?

my question remains:
the things that need placing in this level are they :
-only graphics (as in background tiles)
-graphics that are a representation of objects ?

If it's the latter case i don't think your problem is very common, because your objects will probably be a little different then any other object out there.

EDIT: i opened up google typed in : snap to grid level editor
and found this , is taht what you mean?

[Golds]

EDIT: i opened up google typed in : snap to grid level editor
and found this , is taht what you mean?

Wow, yeah.  This looks pretty great!  Thanks, nikki!

[NandoSoft]

Ive made a 2d tile map editor its pretty generic in the sense that it exports maps in an xml format

source and binaries are available for download

http://nandosoft.com/