FreeGameDev

I remember some foss games trying out Tiled https://www.mapeditor.org/ some years ago but for some reason didn't get much of a pickup or at least that is what seems to me. Would be interesting to know from people what wrong or right went with tiled when they look for a map editor ?

I've used it for a couple game jams, it seems fine for what it does, which is just tile maps.

Tuxemon uses it. My Color Monsters game uses it.

Both ReTux and Hexoshi use it currently, but I'm planning on moving away from it (for Hexoshi, at least; ReTux is not terribly important). Tiled is fantastic, but there's one fatal flaw, for me: the developer of Tiled won't stop changing the TMX format. Changes come in so often that it's just not something I can keep up with. Plus usually you get an older version of Tiled in the repo, and it's difficult to synchronize this.

What would be much better, in my opinion, is if the developer of Tiled would stabilize the TMX format so that it only changes occasionally (like every few years or so), and preferably with strong signifiers for those changes, plus continued compatibility with old versions of the format within Tiled for a substantial period of time. Until that happens, it just isn't really going to work for me, so I'll be moving away from it in favor of custom solutions.

onpon4 {l Wrote}:Tiled is fantastic, but there's one fatal flaw, for me: the developer of Tiled won't stop changing the TMX format. Changes come in so often that it's just not something I can keep up with.

That concerning. I've only just started using tiled. What sort of changes have been problematic? The history in docs doesn't seem like it breaks compatibility a lot. Granted I'm not using it for much other than placing tiles.

http://docs.mapeditor.org/en/stable/reference/tmx-changelog/

Not compatibility breakage, but just the fact that there's now tons of features in Tiled that I (and any contributors) have to remember to ignore, because I just don't have the time to implement all those features into the game, or into the library I developed that loads TMX files into the game (xsge_tmx).

Just an example, the last time I had time to update either python-tmx or xsge_tmx (the former parses the TMX format itself, the latter translates it into the game), there was no such thing as embedded groups, so if someone were to try to do that, my program would have no idea what to do with it. And that's just a recent example; I don't even remember where the unusable features begin, and there's tons of them at this point.

onpon4 {l Wrote}:Not compatibility breakage, but just the fact that there's now tons of features in Tiled that I (and any contributors) have to remember to ignore, because I just don't have the time to implement all those features into the game, or into the library I developed that loads TMX files into the game (xsge_tmx).

Just an example, the last time I had time to update either python-tmx or xsge_tmx (the former parses the TMX format itself, the latter translates it into the game), there was no such thing as embedded groups, so if someone were to try to do that, my program would have no idea what to do with it. And that's just a recent example; I don't even remember where the unusable features begin, and there's tons of them at this point.

Ok. I don't consider that a problem then. You just say you don't support certain features. Now it might be more of a problem in your case because the parser you're using adds that to the data model. I have a simple parser I wrote to get what I need so new features would just be ignored. I probably should be using Tiled for more than I do. Right now I'm just use the tile layout. Placing npcs on the map is done in a separate file.

which gives rise to one more interesting question, what features of tiled people use heavily and which features people were surprised to find in tiled. It would be interesting if people comment on that.