Hello all,

I'm trying to make the move from designing games using engines other people built to using C++ with Allegro to make my own. So far so good on the coding side of things; I'm learning the library and how C++ works well enough. I'm up to the point where I'd like to use mapping utilities to make larger tile maps.

Mappy seems like it does exactly what I want, and I'm working on learning that. I've run into an early snag, however. When I load a tilesheet into Mappy for use, it garbles the tile positions so that it makes it nearly impossible to design a map in any reasonable amount of time. Blocks that should be next to each other to allow quick drawing are moved around, and it actually gets worse as you zoom in and out; things move again. What is nicely lined up in my grid out of Mappy gets rearranged in Mappy.

I'd like to know if there's a way to move around the tiles within Mappy in what I'll call the "tile palette" window, for lack of a better term. The Mappy forums are locked up and I can't post there, so I thought I'd try here!

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Does Tiled have the functionality of being able to move tiles around in your "palette" window so you can organize them before actually starting to paint the map itself? I mucked around on the Tiled website and I didn't see a reference to this.

If neither Mappy nor Tiled has this capability (or if no one knows) then does anyone know of a way to break a png into tiles and allow the user to move them around as tiles to try and prepare them for input to a program like this? I suppose it would be an interesting programming exercise to make such an application myself, but I can't imagine this is a unique problem.

Sure, when I'm home after work today maybe I'll check it out. What I liked about Mappy was that integration with Allegro was super slick. If Tiled is just as easy, hey, maybe that's the way to go.

Either way, it looks like arranging the tiles is gonna be a pain in the caboose.

If you create your own map editor which isn't that hard you can have it do exactly what you want

For some perhaps, I never could figure out how to properly use an existing map editor, not even with all the help I could get, so I developed my own with help from a friend and turned out to be a lot easier for me.

Tiled is more flexible, IIRC, you can load several images to make a single tile set. Just give it a try already...

Actually, that's not true. There is at least a C library that parses Tiled maps for you, I have worked on it myself. It is slightly outdated, but most of the functionality should still work with the newest Tiled version. However, I think there even was a library that directly supported drawing Tiled maps to Allegro 5. You'll have to look somewhere on the Tiled website/wiki, I think it had a page where it listed all the libraries for Tiled support.

EDIT:
And here it is. It does mention Allegro 5 in the C section, so hopefully that will help you.

Ugh. I'm using Visual C++ 2010, since it works with Allegro 5, and Mappy does not have existing utilities that work in this context, as far as I can tell.

So, in digging around the various information about Tiled, it's clear I don't even know what I don't know. I gather that, in order to use Tiled, I need to understand how to get information from an XML file. But there's zero useful tutorials I can find about how to go about doing that.

I mean, I want to learn this stuff, but I'm not even sure how to go about learning what I need to know to make an XML parser or fix those others have made...

There is a fully functional Tiled map loader that supports both JSON and TMX files written in C here: (https://github.com/baylej/tmx). It has an Allegro example to show usage and it is a little bit simpler than allegro_tiled from dradtke (Specially on Windows with that glib dependency)... My current project uses it as the Tiled map parser and loader (https://github.com/rlam1/SuperGameCode)

About learning XML... It certainly helps to know it to manually edit the TMX file.. but the beauty of the libraries such as baylej/tmx is that all that is abstracted away in simple functions and it takes care of the details of parsing the XML file. All the heavy lifting is done with it and it presents to you standard C/C++ structs you can use to render your map in Allegro, the only thing it does not support is making changes to the map from it, but why would you do that in game?

Have you tried attaching a debugger and setting a breakpoint there to see what value CurrentBlock->user1 holds? Is "== 1" maybe not what you want, but rather ">= 1" or "!= 0"?

What was Tiled not doing for you?

Did you look at this first?

Mappy isn't bad maybe it's just true we are the Tiled fanclub up there... If it works for you then congratulations! Keep up making something great.

On another note, yes, allegro_tiled is a pain to use on Visual Studio, Glib is apparently not welcome there and it uses that to store the map's list of properties among other things. I gave up on that one and instead used https://github.com/baylej/tmx but that one still uses cmake and not just simple .h and .c files to drop in a project. Try to leave that as a long term project when you gain more experience. Most libraries come in that format and its highly probable in the future you will benefit from using them instead of re-inventing the wheel all over again.