AuthorTopic: Is anyone using The Tile Wizard?  (Read 2346 times)

Offline drakus2011

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Is anyone using The Tile Wizard?

on: March 28, 2011, 02:59:50 am
The Tile Wizard has been available for two weeks now.  Is anyone using the program?  If so what do you like about it?  What could be better about it?  If you're not using the program, what would get you to try it out?

Offline trough

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Re: Is anyone using The Tile Wizard?

Reply #1 on: March 28, 2011, 03:35:11 am
It seems to me there is already an abundance of excellent graphics development tools (Grafx2, Gimp, YY-CHR, Tile Studio, etc.). Personally, I'm in love with Grafx2, which is cross-platform. The Tile Wizard would have to be pretty awesome to get me to switch. Honestly I can only think of two things I don't like about Grafx2: It lacks support for animation, and I don't know how to scale an image. But for tile editing, it's perfect. How will your program differ from the popular choices? For what reasons are you creating this program?

If you ask me about map editors, that's a completely different matter. I run Linux, and there aren't any good map editors that run natively. I tried Tiled, but it is missing some important features like rotating and flipping. Right now I have resorted to using Open tUME, which is fantastic, but it's a DOS program. I'd love to see a good cross-platform map editor, with support for color palettes per-tile, layers, X and Y flipping, and 90 degree rotation.

[/rambling] Sorry about that. :-X

Offline drakus2011

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Re: Is anyone using The Tile Wizard?

Reply #2 on: March 28, 2011, 05:51:09 am
The Tile Wizard was designed for the main purpose of testing your tiles to see how they look together as they would be in your game.( To help me learn to make pixel art tiles)  This program does not actually build map files for your games.

 It also allows for basic pixel editing of each tile, undo and redo actions, and saving and loading of palettes you create in the program.  These are not the only features.  It has two ways to test tiles.  Default Mode and Override Mode.  Default Mode takes your active tile and tiles it by itself in a corner of the program.  Override Mode allows you to individually place any of your tiles wherever you want in the same corner of the program.  Also this corner of the program updates automatically every time you edit your tiles so you can see how your editing instantly affects the tiling.

It also has a Color Quickbar for storing 10 colors to switch between with the 1-0 keys or the - and = keys(great for two shortcuts with your drawing tablet) on your keyboard.    It was made with the Java programming language and should be cross-platform.

(1)  I just finished enhancing the program to support more than 32x32 pixel-sized tiles.  8x8, 16x16, 32x32, and 64x64.  You can only use one size of tile throughout each instance of the program.
(2)  Also just added was the ability to have as many tiles as you need instead of being restricted to four.
These two new features will be available within an hour of this posting. 

Animations are a feature that I will be working on very soon, after adding a new window that you can open to test tiles in a large area( the size of the main program). 

 I personally am not familiar with graphics programs so I cannot say how these programs differ other than that The Tile Wizard is very simple in terms of editing, but is very helpful in terms of testing your tiles together and making simple edits to get things looking right quickly.   There are more features that you can find on my website  http://www.twodimensionalgames.com or on The Tile Wizard Software post of this forum.