A case for Terrain Mapping (tile maps)

I know Ashley has mentioned that he doesn't quite see the point in reinventing the wheel when it comes to certain tools from Tiled, but there is one rather big reason why having terrain mapping might be a good idea, and I realized it when the newest update included the ability to modify tilemaps at runtime.

I mean, with tile maps, inevitably, you're gonna be seeing people using it in level editors and games where you can modify the terrain in some fashion. Aside from making life a lot easier for those people if they want tiles to 'blend', it would also open up interesting possibilities for naturalistic tile-based terrain that can also be modified in-game, and I imagine there could be settings to identify which 'terrain' a tile properly belongs to, for the sake of games like Terraria, where you break blocks to gather resources, and stuff like that. And you can probably have terrain tiles that exist in cases where they don't 'blend' with the surrounding tiles.

tl;dr: Terrain mapping has plenty of in-game potential as well as being useful for editing. Food for thought.

I was able to replicate dynamic terrain deformation using the bitwise meathod for determining which tile to display.

saltgames.com/2010/a-bitwise-method-for-applying-tilemaps

I did it first with just a sprite with a different tile on each frame, but i was also able to achieve the same result with the new tilemap plugin.

Took a while to setup but it would be awesome if it was built into the tilemap plugin.

+1 for — I did the same thing with hand using arrays before, integrating it wouldn't be too difficult I presume.

Still, integrating techniques like that could potentially be a hassle.

Terrain mapping might also pave the way for stuff such as, say, automatic tile blending, with each terrain having a set of 'edges' that, when bordered with another tile, the terrain automatically 'blends' in a certain fashion (for example, 'man-made' tiles will simple sit side-by-side, most natural terrain will blend with each other, water washes over most stuff, etc). Not sure how feasible that would be, but it would be interesting.

do you think this could replace the tile generator used in our game to make it run better on mobile? We use the same tile generation as "Go Faster"

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/104143348/You%20can't%20escape%20ALPHA/index.html