Hello. I hope people are still here, because I’m still working on this game engine!
I’ve added nearly full support for TMX files. TMX is a tile map format used primarily by a program called Tiled Map Editor. Click here to try it out. I highly recommend using the latest “Daily Build” version because it is much much newer than the 0.9.1 release.
So I grabbed a Zero Mission tile sheet, whipped together some brushes, and quickly painted out this map:
My engine speeds things up by pre-rendering each tile layer into an image. So if you have 48,302 tiles spread across 4 layers, you end up with only 4 textured rectangles displaying on-screen instead of 48,302. It also merges layers with the same name into the same image, so you can jam-pack as many tiles and overlapping see-through details as you want and gameplay will remain equally smooth.
And as of tonight the engine responds to “objects” in the TMX files, letting games insert these non-tiled objects as active instances in the world. In other words working with my engine suddenly feels even more like Game Maker, lol.
But better, obviously. <_>
The game scripts maintain full control over where/how/when/why each tile layer appears, as well as what to do with each individual object (if needed), so the possibilities are endless.
============
So if you think about it…
You can start building Tallon IV if you want; just use Tiled and it will work in my engine. Or if you don’t like Tiled, there are several other programs that can save in TMX format, such as tIDE Tile Map Editor. These things are way better than my “TIVNav” app if anyone still remembers that.