Forums » Impact Engine » Non-square tiles in Weltmeister?

Weltmeister doesn't support non-square tiles and it's not planned for Impact 1.x.

You could hack the ig.BackgroundMap class to support non square tiles or choose a smaller tilesize: E.g. if your tiles are 32px wide and 16px high, use a tilesize of 16.

Quote from Arantor
(Where was that posted, btw?)

On Twitter and IRC.

Implementing slopes The Right Way(tm), so that they work in every possible scenario, is incredibly hard. It's "easy" to build a hack that works for floor tiles and 45° angles only, but I wanted a more robust solution that works for all types of games, not only Jump'n'Runs.

I'll need a few more days to get this ready. I'm sorry for the delay. I'll definitely release 1.19 before Christmas!

Thanks for the info.

I think I'm going to have to seriously reconsider what I'm doing, the tiles aren't an even ratio like 2:1, the tiles used thus far are based on being 32x25 (long story, heh) but maybe I can adjust the rest of the design to work with either taller or wider squares to get closer to an integer ratio where I can make it work sanely.

That said, actually, I'm thinking I might just do it manually anyway because the player moves over tiles and the tile itself can give the player behaviour (e.g. arrows that affect the player's movement) and that seems to me like it's a bit more than a background map and almost closer to being passive entities that the player interacts with, but I'll experiment and see what I end up with (though I'd be the first to admit I'm not so hot on Weltmeister as opposed to doing stuff myself...)

And yeah, I can well imagine that slopes are tricky, though I won't deny it'll be cool to have slopes that aren't multiples of 45 degrees, can see a lot of fun to be had there.

OK, so I seem to have figured this out in the meantime. Actually, it seems to be fairly straightforward. This is almost certainly going to be broken by the changes in 1.19 but in case it helps anyone running 1.18a...

All you really need to do with it is the following (hopefully not posting too much stuff to those who haven't got a licence)

1. Fix the editor to provide the space for width/height
* First, modify the editor's HTML file where it defines the textbox with id layerTilesize and create another line of markup; I renamed the first to layerTilewidth and the second to layerTileheight.

2. Replace all the instances of tilesize in every file. You'll need to use two variables instead of one, of course, whether you choose to define tilesize: { x: 8, y: 8 } as the default and always refer to that as tilesize.x and tilesize.y, or to create two explicit variables is mostly up to you - but I found it a ton easier to do two separate variables since that meant not altering any of the code attached to saving or loading. Just remember to change the default tilesize declaration for tilewidth and tileheight default declarations.

3. Certain function signatures will be altered by doing the above, notably the background map's constructor (and all its dependents). Provided that you're absolutely methodical about replacing and always use tilewidth then tileheight, it actually shouldn't be a problem.

4. Last but by no means least, there are instances where tilesize is referenced on its own. Now, virtually every reference that's on its own (if not all of them) is for a drawTile call - the parameter is the width parameter for drawing in ig.Image.drawTile, and it assumes it's square. In the case of drawTile calls, just substitute the tilewidth and the tileheight as parameters into the call, because both will be required. I spent about an hour trying to figure out why it was mis-drawing my tiles because I'd just assumed it wanted tileheight by the parameter list, not tilewidth and tileheight.

This needs to be done on all files, looks to me like it modifies the following:
* weltmeister.html
* lib/impact/
background-map.js
collision-map.js
game.js
map.js
* lib/impact/debug/
maps-panel.js
* lib/weltmeister/
config.js
edit-map.js
tile-select.js
weltmeister.js

I haven't tested this thoroughly so it's likely there are some bugs I haven't run into yet, but it's not a mammoth endeavour, far smaller than I envisaged it would be, props to Dominic for the code quality :)

Hexagon tiles would be especially helpful for bird's eye view type strategy tiles.

err, "bird's eye view type strategy games" i mean

As discussed elsewhere, hex tiles is massively more complex than rectangular tiles and if rectangular tiles won't happen before 2.0, I certainly can't see hex tiles happening any time soon (especially as it's even less common, I suspect)

I hope not only the tile map but also the images map in Weltmeister

Yes, the changes I outlined apply to Weltmeister just as much as they apply to things actually working in Impact itself, which means I can build maps just fine.

Hex maps, though, are a long, long way off if they ever happen in the core.