Program for easy creation of Autotile tilesets.

[ValidDark]

Hello!

I was working on my 2D rpg engine and realized a feature I had made could be made into a standalone program and would help out your community a great deal.
Basically it takes 2  32x32 tiles and an alphamask, and outputs a 64x64 block, which is the autotile format.
I don't know of I'm using all the correct terminology and whatnot, I'm not a member of your community, but it was pointed out to me that my formatting for environmental tilesets looks like the format rpgmaker uses, so I looked into it and it turns out it would work just fine.

The reason I'm considering releasing this to your community, is because I know how hard it is to find good resources for making games, especially free resources, and how much of a pain it is, when you finally find the grass tile that is perfect for you, but the only tileset has it with sand that just doesn't provide the look you're going for.  With this all of that can be fixed.

here is an example of what it output when given 7 grass, sand, and dirt tiles.

and this is with this very basic alphamask

Don't comment on how crappy those tiles are up there, I'm not a very good artist, those are the first 21 environment tiles I've ever made.

it still needs a lot of work, as I said it's not really even its own program right now, it's part of another program, so if I were to release it to you I'd need to do some work on it, like give it a GUI and stuff.  just compiled the first standalone version of it and it works, (which is what the picture above is from)

So if you guys find this program interesting or might have a use for it, I can polish it up a bit and release it to you, or if it's not something you guys think you want or could use I'll just go back to programming my games. 

also, if there are any good or decent artists or concept artists out there, I'm working on a 2D platformer, and the artist that is currently working with me is rather slow, so I could use another one to work with us. 

so let me know what you think.  Good Idea / bad Idea
 

 

[Lars Ulrika]

That's a great idea and I would certainly use it if it's released one day. 

Thanks for thinking about helping us with those autotiles

 

[Shaz]

Looks nice, there are 3 things I'd like to see:


- Autotiles require more tiles than just the square you've got here. If you grab a Maker trial and look at the TileA2.png sprite, you'll see there are 2 additional tiles that will be needed (I know there have been a couple of tutorials on here showing them as well, so you might be able to find them without having to download the engine - if you can't, just say, and I or someone else will find one and link it back so you can see).


- Not all tiles should blend like that. Grass doesn't blend in to water or roads by fading, for instance. There is a hard edge (in the case of water tiles, usually separated by a bit of sand or dirt). So an alphamask that fades won't always do the job - would be nice to have user-created masks.


- I'd like to see how they tile.

 

[StarkinGyra]

I think it is a great start. Cant wait to see more.

 

[Tsukihime]

I'd also like to see a tool that takes a set of tiles and produces auto-tiles based on different specs (eg: XP, VX, or Ace), though not sure whether the output would look the same for all engines.

 

[Kes]

Something like this would certainly help me.

 

[Des]

lots of people would like this kind of thing, but the whole "fading grass" effect looks very awkward in a game. something like this might be able to provide a nice base if we encourage people to manually fix the borders afterwards.

 

[ValidDark]

Looks nice, there are 3 things I'd like to see:

- Autotiles require more tiles than just the square you've got here. If you grab a Maker trial and look at the TileA2.png sprite, you'll see there are 2 additional tiles that will be needed (I know there have been a couple of tutorials on here showing them as well, so you might be able to find them without having to download the engine - if you can't, just say, and I or someone else will find one and link it back so you can see).

- Not all tiles should blend like that. Grass doesn't blend in to water or roads by fading, for instance. There is a hard edge (in the case of water tiles, usually separated by a bit of sand or dirt). So an alphamask that fades won't always do the job - would be nice to have user-created masks.

- I'd like to see how they tile.

Yeah, I just noticed there are 2 32x32 tiles missing, going to work on figuring out how to get those today.

and there is the option for user created alphamasks, just needs to be a 64x64 png with transparency (even if it's just 100% and 0%)

I'm going to work on it tonight when I get a chance, should be able to have an early beta out to you guys sometime tonight / tomorrow, 

but it should tile nicely, all my tests seemed to have worked.  as long as the alphamask can tile, the output can tile.

when I get a release out, can I ask that someone try using it in engine and see how it looks / see if it looks ok?

I'd also like to see a tool that takes a set of tiles and produces auto-tiles based on different specs (eg: XP, VX, or Ace), though not sure whether the output would look the same for all engines.

can anyone get me an example of the different formats used by each engine?

I was under the impresson all rpgmakers used this autotile format,  but then again, I didn't do much research into the matter.

 

[Archeia]

VX and Ace are the same. However XP is a totally different beast.

 

[ValidDark]

#Well, the first version is out

in case that link doesn't work,  it's also an attachment on this post, 

weighing in at 570kB, 357 lines of C++,  and uses 3 - 5 MB of RAM while running depending on how many tiles you do at a time.
 

it's not very user friendly, there are instructions in the readme.

I'm not an artist, the alphamap and tiles I provided are just for proof of concept, 

and I know it's missing the top 2 tiles, they'll be added soon enough. 

 

try it out / let me know what you think / if you have ANY suggestions on how to improve it or what to add to it, let me know.

Easy Autotile v0.1.zip

Easy Autotile v0.1.zip

 

[Selchar]

Looks like I'll be the first to comment after trying it.

It's certainly interesting, just takes some getting used to.  I've attached 2 pictures showing what they look like when used in the editor for mapping.  The first uses your own sample tiles, the second uses some small parts from Celianna/Lunarea's Steampunk collection.  It works fine, tho of course the missing tile is easily noticeable.

In regards to the two missing tiles, you don't have to worry too much about the top left one, it doesn't seem to be actually used in mapping, and is just used by the editor to represent the whole thing.  The top right one tho, has the parts that are missing.  I can't think of an easy way of getting it other than maybe using a 2nd alphamask specifically for it, a 32x32 one used with the original 32x32 tile.

Regardless good job, it looks good!

 

[Shaz]

Uh, yeah ... the top left tile is what's shown on the tileset in the editor. So if you don't have it, you've got no idea what tile you're about to choose

 

[ValidDark]

Thanks for posting that pic Selchar, looks good, 
and yeah, that missing piece is definantly presenting a problem, because I don't really want to make it require 2 alphamasks, but then again, the only way to make it work (that i've though of so far) with just the one alphamask would require it to be remade, and would impose even more limiting factors in the creation of the alphamask.  Because if I take the bottom left 16x16 of the 64x64 and stick it in the top right of the missing 32x32 and fill out the 32x32 that way and invert the tiles used, it doesn't quite match up. I'll fiddle with it tonight some. 

 

[Selchar]

I did tests involving rotating the provided alphamask, shifting it a few pixels here and there, etc... but ultimately it just doesn't look right. So I went and used it as a base to make an appropriate alphamask. Didn't take long at all really, it really seems like unless you make the 1st one with that tile in mind, there's no choice but to use a 2nd one.

So why not split the difference, have a pre-made alphamask set up that can be used on it's own for all of the tiles, and an "option" to use an additional mask if the user is using one that won't work(like the provided sample).

Anyways, here are some updated pics, and the mask I made.  It's a little rough since I'm not that used to using Gimp for this yet, but can easily be improved.

 

[ValidDark]

Ahh superawesome, thanks for making that, I just got scribblenauts for the Wii-U in the mail today so I've been playing it most of the day,  
should have a new version with all the tiles tomorrow or the next day, going to work on it right now for a hour or so.

 

[ValidDark]

New version out, 
Easy Autotile v0.2

Now includes the top 2 missing tiles, 
currently the top 2 tiles are the same, was having some issues with the top left one and wanted to get this release out tonight, so I 
am going to fix the top left one tomorrow,  but since it's not really used by the map maker other than to see what tile you've selected it doesn't really matter.
adding support for those 2 lines bumped it up to 441 lines long,

any bugs you encounter please let me know about. 


 

Easy Autotile.zip

 

[Selchar]

It's a good idea to test unusual tiles/combinations.  I almost didn't catch it, but it seems you're making that top right tile differently than what I did.  Here are some pics for comparison.  The first pic shows what the new maker outputs, the 2nd one shows what it should be.  The 3rd pic shows the difference itself, yours is on the left, mine is on the right.

I think it's pretty clear what happened, and the fix should be easy.  The 2nd mask should either be used on the original 32x32 images, and grab the tile that way, or apply it to the very center of the 64x64 til portion, which is essentially the original image anyways.

 

[ValidDark]

yeah, it's an easy fix.  I had it like that, and I messed up and it didn't look right, so I did some headlogic that came out wrong and thought it was supposed to be like that instead. 
just have to delete like 8 lines of code and change 2 numbers and it'll be fixed.
will do it tonight, new version will be posted in a few hours. (4 - 5 hours)
Been playing Path of Exile, the open beta came out yesterday, it's sooooo good. 

 

[Selchar]

Well good that it's an easy fix, I imagine when that's done there won't be much else to add/change, other than alternative alphamasks(which can be made/customized by anyone), and maybe an actual UI instead of just running the program, which would allow one to choose what tiles/masks to use instead of setting it up before hand with the bmps and settings text file(completely optional really I think, it's easy to use already).

Overall I like the program, makes things easier, or at least was fun to experiment seeing several different tiles blend together so easily and ready to use.

 

[ValidDark]

Lost track of time playing PoE, don't have time to re-release tonight, will for sure get it done tomorrow though.