Question/Suggestion: Tilemaps

Is there a way to make use of tilemaps yet?

Seriously, that was the one feature Game Maker had that made it appealing. RPG Maker was obviously the easiest program to use tilemaps, though, so I'd take note of RPG Maker if you plan to add such a feature.

Basically, what a tilemap is is a large image of tiles. Some people call them tilesets. Anyway, you can use tilemaps to build levels for platform-jumping games and traditional RPGs. Beyond that, tiles don't seem to help, but who knows, someone could find a use for 'em!

Last I checked (last year), Construct didn't have a tilemap feature, and I don't think it had a snap-to-other-objects feature, either, so building a tile-based stage was probably a little difficult. I do remember you could create backgrounds with a repeated tile, but how is that useful for anything other than a single-tile ground?

You can design your own tile map using an array of sprites currently, like I did in my procedural content post, but it is a little more complicated than a tilemap object. It serves the same purpose but requires a lot of looping.

According to David they are at work on a Tilemap object already...though there's no telling when it'll make it into release.

I don't think it had a snap-to-other-objects

Can't you just use the grid with the snap-to feature enabled?

you can transfer tilemaps to Sprite animation frames using the animators' image importer as described here. that could be described as a a limited implementation (targeted at character animation)... the Tile object (that repeats/wraps its content when stretched, and does not scale it like the Sprite) does not support animation. depending on what exactly you want to do, this might mean 'yes' or 'no' to your question :)

I would love proper tileset support too... fingers crossed

The image importer works great for sequential sprites - and the tile slicing feature can probably be used for some cool effects, too... but not so great for different sized objects on the same sprite sheet - say chairs, trees, or body parts for rigged sprites. It would be cool if the image editor had a "select - exclude outside" so you could delete the stuff around the pixels you want to keep. OR - a button to "convert selection to sprite."

Then again, I just learned you can maximize the image editor (thanks, Mipey!), so maybe it can already do these things?

Converting a small tileset of 8x8 tiles will it produce 64 sprites in the Objects manager. This on a large project becomes a real mess, and searching tiles can slow down your productivity a lot.

Maybe a better way to display or organize the sprites/tiles on the Objects manager would be more useful for all users, including those who used to use tilemaps

More organizational options have been planned for future builds of Construct. It's a topic much discussed.

Better organisation features heavily in the next build; also, the tileset object looks relatively complete from what I saw the other day, though it depends when David has time to finish it.