[Request] Multi-tile pickup (yet again)

Ashley I would like to request for the bazillionth time that we get a multi-tile-pickup in addition to the single-tile-pickup that was added a few releases ago. We have been needing this since the day the tilemap object was added over a year ago. As I've said before it will...

-Drastically increase production speed by allowing us to reuse laid out tile patterns no matter the size or complexity.

-Let us rotate/flip/mirror said tile patterns.

-Allow us to shift large portions of tiles as needed.

Please and thank you. Good day. Cheers.

What does multi tile pick up mean, is there a post that explains the feature request somewhere?

—

I believe it's like using a marquee or lasso tool to pickup a portion of tiles placed on the layout, so you are able to move or stamp it in other places of the layout saving a lot of time. If you build a tree out of multiple tiles with different branches and stuff you could clone it in the layout without having to reconstruct it from scratch every time. Like a brush made from a collection of tiles you pickup from the layout.

Yeah, it's essentially copy/paste. Some tile editors actually have you use a 'pointer tool' and ctrl+c / ctrl+v which is awful, so I refer to it as "picking up" instead. If you've used Tiled before, it's the same as right click + dragging.

Most tilesets are arranged in a way that saves the most space and groups certain tiles together, but specific patterns/structures have to be created yourself on the map. Right now you have to recreate each one by hand, tile-by-tile. With this feature you can do that once, "pick up" the whole thing, and place a duplicate elsewhere. You can also do this with smaller patterns and such to speed things up.

I guess there just aren't many people using the tilemap object or else this would be a very commonly requested feature :T

A way to arrange tiles like a data import at runtime might be nice.

Something like importing a small portion of a map, as an object, say a castle using events.

I realise it will be rejected here obviously, but it would be useful elsewhere.

The tilemap plugin could use alot more functionality.

• save additional data per tile
• pop and push, like arrays. Maybe reverse and sort too?
• a for each tile loop and a for area loop (start at x,y for width,height) <-- would be usefull for arrays too

(I know you can do all of this with functions and array combos but especially in case of handling big data like arrays of tiles/data it is good to have efficient low level implementations )

But i dont see that happen as long as Ashley doesn't get some more help with development. I don't know how he managed to develop c2 on it's own in the first place, but now that he develops c3 and has to take care of c2 on the side

— Yeah there's a handful of new features it could have but I'm just trying to get what we NEED right now before it's too late!

We already built one level for our game (320x240 res with 8x8 tiles) and it took over a month because we don't have this feature :<

Tokinsom you referred the editor "Tiled" before.

Couldn't you just use Tiled to layout your levels and load it into c2 via json?

— I really don't want to derail this thread with Tiled discussions (it's happened before) so I'll just say this: C2 does not provide all the functionality you need to properly utilize external editors like Tiled. Mostly because they often use "Tile Layers" which utilize multiple tilemaps each, whereas C2 only has "Tilemap Objects" that utilize a single tilemap - There are fundamental differences that prevent them from working well together. You can sort of import .tmx files directly into C2's Tilemap objects, but this is a completely unacceptable workflow and merely a temporary workaround as far as I'm concerned. Even if C2 could properly use Tiled...it's kind of silly to sacrifice everything C2's layout editor offers for 1 feature, don't you think? C2's layout editor is vastly superior seeing as it's fully integrated and "WYSIWYG". If Ashley adds this one feature then I can't think of a single reason to use an external editor other than randomly/dynamically generated levels.

I hope that settles that

I just used instances to add multiple layers of the rougelike tile map from Kenny.

The zip uses clones.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666 ... tances.zip

And here's the instanced version:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666 ... edMap.capx

Took about 5 minutes

.....ok? I think you're completely missing the point here.

Nope. You said you can't use a tmx because it uses layers, but instances can work exactly the same way.

If fact you could probably get away with using clones if you load the leave the texture out, and load it at runtime.

Frankly I don't see why you can't use it this way unless your argument is that it takes too long to load separate layers.

We're talking about 2 different things. I was referring to loading Tiled's tileset layers (with multiple tilesets each) into C2's tilemap objects via the TMX Importer at runtime. The TMX Importer was designed to use sprite objects acting as tiles, so it doesn't provide the necessary features to use tilemap objects instead. On that note, using sprites acting as tiles is horribly inefficient and hard to manage, so if you ask me, the TMX Importer should be canned.

You're talking about importing .tmx layers into tilemap objects in the editor. While that is a solution, it is a really awful workflow when you have many tilemap objects + other objects, zones, triggers, etc. in the layout that you have to account for. Again, it is merely a temporary workaround as far as I'm concerned.

Now...You might be able to load tile layers properly during runtime via XML or something, but that still doesn't justify switching to Tiled. You'll sacrifice everything C2's layout editor has to offer and have to hard-code every single objects' creation and properties, among other things. There's a lot of baggage. It's too late to do that for our game anyway; we're over 9 months in.

Besides, Ashley is almost done with this feature. We already have a single-tile pickup. I'm simply asking he also allow us to pick up multiple tiles with a marquee selection.