MmysterypaintAug 13, 2016 at 10:34 pm
Hello! First of all, thank you for making such an excellent pixel/level creation tool: It's been a very helpful tool for my game experiments.
This might have already been mentioned before, is there a way or plans to add a method of swapping tilesets in a single map? It was a feature I found very helpful working in Tiled for 2d level design, and it would help a lot if I could separate my sprite-spawning "tiles" from the actual, visible tiles.
So, I tried working around this, by giving my entire 256x256 tilemap a unique tile. Then, I stacked the sprite 256x256 tilemap directly below it so the entire tilemap was 256x512, breaking each tile into 16x16.
Afterward, I realized that the tilemapping wasn't working anymore, and that I had to remap every tile.
Unfortunately, because of my roundabout method, it caused a different problem: "Reidentify Tile Layers" automatically optimized my tiles, taking into consideration rotation and horizontal/vertical flipping. While this feature is appreciated, it caused my tile/spritespawn indexes to shift ever so slightly, making it difficult to map and parse quickly. I noticed that importing has the option to disable the optimization features, and was hoping if "Reidentify Tile Layers" could have those same options.
Thank you for your time, and thanks again for the wonderful program!
DanikAug 23, 2016 at 5:11 pm
Hi Mysterypaint,
Thank you. I'm glad you find PE helpful!
Swapping tilesets is something that's not very well supported at the moment, but I see how it would be very useful. I haven't thought of a great way to implement it without making things too complicated. The quickest way to do it would be to replace the tiles using the tileset from another .pyxel document, and based on tile indices in the tilesets, but I'm not sure that's nice workflow.
I don't completely follow what you are trying to do. What are the sprite-spawning tiles used for? Are they just used as "indices" into the tileset, and you copy and paste the new tileset bitmap data on top of them in the canvas to replace the tiles?
I will add an options window for Reidentify layer tiles in the next version, the functionality is implemented so it's an easy thing to fix. I hope that helps your use case a bit.
MmysterypaintAug 24, 2016 at 12:59 pm
Hi again! Thank you for the reply.
Regarding sprite-spawning, I suppose what I'm really asking for is support for multiple tilemaps, where if the first tileset ended on Tile #256, the next tileset would start on #257. For the sprite layer in my maps, I have 16x16 "tile" representations of the top-left corner of where I would spawn my game sprites, like the player spawn point, enemy spawn positions, item upgrades, and so on... The sprite tiles don't actually exist in my game but they show up as hex numbers in PyxelEdit, so it's easier to know which sprite to spawn and where they should spawn within the map. The sprites are spawned using data from the exported array from the sprite layer, and exist yet are inactive whenever they are off the canvas.
I intend to use several different tilesets for some locations of my map (it's a big game!), and I think that by implementing a numbering scheme for multiple tilesets similar to Tiled, where additional tilesets are numbered on top of the previous tileset, I feel it would help make PyxelEdit more versatile to use the same sprite sheet across several, consistent-dimension tilesets. Additionally, I think such a feature could make PyxelEdit more of an exclusive pixel art/level editing tool, streamlining tilemap-based level designing.