Tiled « Silveira Neto

I’m using the Tiled Map Editor for a while, I even wrote that tutorial about it. It’s a general purpose tile map editor, written in Java but now migrating to C++ with Qt, that can be easily used with my set of free pixelart tiles.

map editor tiles tileset game deveopment

A map done with Tiled is stored in a file with TMX extension. It’s just a XML file, easy to understand.

As I’m creating a map loader for my owns purposes, the procedure I’m doing here works we need some simplifications. I’m handling orthogonal maps only. I’m not supporting tile properties as well. I also don’t want to handle base64 and zlib encoding in this version, so in the Tiled editor, go at the menu Edit → Preferences and in the Saving tab unmark the options “Use binary encoding” and “Compress Layer Data (gzip)”, like this:

Tiled Preferences Window

When saving a map it will produce a TMX file like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE map SYSTEM "http://mapeditor.org/dtd/1.0/map.dtd">
<map version="1.0" orientation="orthogonal" width="10" height="10" tilewidth="32" tileheight="32">
 <properties>
  <property name="Author" value="Silveira Neto"/>
  <property name="Year" value="2009"/>
 </properties>
 <tileset name="mytiles" firstgid="1" tilewidth="32" tileheight="32">
  <image source="free_tileset_version_10.png"/>
 </tileset>
 <layer name="grass" width="10" height="10">
  <data>
   <tile gid="261"/>
   <tile gid="260"/>
    ...
   <tile gid="160"/>
   <tile gid="0"/>
  </data>
 </layer>
</map>

For processing it on Python I’m using the event oriented SAX approach for XML. So I create a ContentHandler that handles events the start and end of XML elements. In the first element, map, I know enough to create a Pygame surface with the correct size. I’m also storing the map properties so I can use it later for add some logics or effects on the map. After that we create a instance of the Tileset class from where we will get the each tile by an gid number. Each layer has it’s a bunch of gids in the correct order. So it’s enough information to mount and draw a map.

# Author: Silveira Neto
# License: GPLv3
import sys, pygame
from pygame.locals import *
from pygame import Rect
from xml import sax
 
class Tileset:
    def __init__(self, file, tile_width, tile_height):
        image = pygame.image.load(file).convert_alpha()
        if not image:
            print "Error creating new Tileset: file %s not found" % file
        self.tile_width = tile_width
        self.tile_height = tile_height
        self.tiles = []
        for line in xrange(image.get_height()/self.tile_height):
            for column in xrange(image.get_width()/self.tile_width):
                pos = Rect(
                        column*self.tile_width,
                        line*self.tile_height,
                        self.tile_width,
                        self.tile_height )
                self.tiles.append(image.subsurface(pos))
 
    def get_tile(self, gid):
        return self.tiles[gid]
 
class TMXHandler(sax.ContentHandler):
    def __init__(self):
        self.width = 0
        self.height = 0
        self.tile_width = 0
        self.tile_height = 0
        self.columns = 0
        self.lines  = 0
        self.properties = {}
        self.image = None
        self.tileset = None
 
    def startElement(self, name, attrs):
        # get most general map informations and create a surface
        if name == 'map':
            self.columns = int(attrs.get('width', None))
            self.lines  = int(attrs.get('height', None))
            self.tile_width = int(attrs.get('tilewidth', None))
            self.tile_height = int(attrs.get('tileheight', None))
            self.width = self.columns * self.tile_width
            self.height = self.lines * self.tile_height
            self.image = pygame.Surface([self.width, self.height]).convert()
        # create a tileset
        elif name=="image":
            source = attrs.get('source', None)
            self.tileset = Tileset(source, self.tile_width, self.tile_height)
        # store additional properties.
        elif name == 'property':
            self.properties[attrs.get('name', None)] = attrs.get('value', None)
        # starting counting
        elif name == 'layer':
            self.line = 0
            self.column = 0
        # get information of each tile and put on the surface using the tileset
        elif name == 'tile':
            gid = int(attrs.get('gid', None)) - 1
            if gid <0: gid = 0
            tile = self.tileset.get_tile(gid)
            pos = (self.column*self.tile_width, self.line*self.tile_height)
            self.image.blit(tile, pos)
 
            self.column += 1
            if(self.column>=self.columns):
                self.column = 0
                self.line += 1
 
    # just for debugging
    def endDocument(self):
        print self.width, self.height, self.tile_width, self.tile_height
        print self.properties
        print self.image
 
def main():
    if(len(sys.argv)!=2):
        print 'Usage:\n\t{0} filename'.format(sys.argv[0])
        sys.exit(2)
    pygame.init()
    screen = pygame.display.set_mode((800, 480))
    parser = sax.make_parser()
    tmxhandler = TMXHandler()
    parser.setContentHandler(tmxhandler)
    parser.parse(sys.argv[1])
    while 1:
        for event in pygame.event.get():
            if event.type == QUIT:
                return
            elif event.type == KEYDOWN and event.key == K_ESCAPE:
                return
        screen.fill((255,255,255))
        screen.blit(tmxhandler.image, (0,0))
        pygame.display.flip()
        pygame.time.delay(1000/60)
 
if __name__ == "__main__": main()

Here is the result for opening a four layers map file:

That’s it. You can get this code and adapt for your game because next versions will be a lot more coupled for my own purposes and not so general.

Download:maploader.tar.bz2 It’s the Netbeans 6.7 (Python EA 2) project file but that can be opened or used with another IDE or without one. Also contains the village.tmx map and the tileset.

Tiled is general purpose game map editor, with support of several map formats (XML, JSON), multi plataform and runs installed or from browser, supports plugins to read and write others map formats and all free (under GPL license).

Installing

You can lauch Tiled via Java Web Start or download it’s lastest version zip file. After download it just unzip it and run:

java -jar tiled.jar

Make sure you have at least Java 1.5 installed and configured.

Creating a empty map

After lauching it, open the menu File → New and create a new 10×10 orthogonal map with 32×32 tiles.

Like this one

tiled 10x10 map

Creating a tileset

Now we need to add a tileset to start drawing a map. Let’s use this one

batalhao tileset cc by sa

Save the tileset image above. Open the menu Tilesets → New Tileset select Reference tileset image and browser to find the tileset image you saved. Keep tile width and height as 32 and tile spacing and margin as 0.

tiled new tileset

Notice a new tab on the Tile palette section.

tiled tileset

Working with layers

Select the first grass tile from the tileset and select the fill tool ( icon) to create a grass field. Use the paint tool ( icon) to add some stones and trees at random locations on grass. On the Layers section double click at Layer Name and put a name like “field”.

Now let’s create another layer to put the buildings and streets. We can do that by opening the menu Layer → Add Layer or just clicking the icon on layer’s section. Let’s call it “city”.

Now build your city by selecting tiles on the palette and using the paint tool. There’s tiles for horizontal and vertical street and all kinds of intersection. For the building you can click and drag in the palette to select multiple tiles at once.

Saving

You can save the map as tmx (XML Tiled map file) , JSON, LUA, wlk, map (Mappy) or export it as a image. There’s some options accessible on the Edit → Preferences menu like use base-64 gziped encoding.

Thanks to Adam Turk and Bjørn Lindeijer for developing that great project.

In a next post I want to show how to integrate this with a Java/JavaFX game.