Thinking with overlapping tiles

Started by Zaidyer, July 09, 2015, 07:04:08 AM

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I suspect newcomers to the editor might have some trouble with this at first, since most everything else out there uses a basic tile grid for editing maps.
You can do that in Solarus of course, but I actually really like how you can overlap tiles as much as you want, and whatever's on top takes priority over whatever's underneath it on the same layer.
You can use it to knock out passageways for doors in an otherwise singular wall object, instead of making two walls on each side. Just lazily put down a walkable floor right on top of the wall and extend it out so it overlaps the other wall, then decorate with door graphics.
Coming from other editors, the first thing you might try to do when you make something that has "fringes" like a carpet is lay out the carpet and then surround it with up to four separate border pieces, but if the borders are just the same tile graphic you don't have to. You can lay out a carpet made of two extended tiles; one is the border piece, and you just make it as big as the whole carpet is going to be. The other is the carpet itself, which you overlap as much as you want.

Every tile is essentially another block of text in your map files, so if you think creatively when you set up and use your tilesets, you can keep things cleaner and take lots of shortcuts that wouldn't be possible in other editors.

Anyway, I like it.

Thanks!
That's true, overlapping tiles can be surprising the first time. Multimedia Fusion does that too.
Maybe "tile" is actually not a great name :)

Quote from: Christopho on July 09, 2015, 08:41:12 AM
Thanks!
That's true, overlapping tiles can be surprising the first time. Multimedia Fusion does that too.
Maybe "tile" is actually not a great name :)
I have worked with Multimedia Fusion's predecessor, The Games Factory. It had that overlapping system as well. It's really neat.