Slashstone Mapas: generic 2D tilemap editor, first public release

[Bad Sector]

Slashstone Mapas is a tilemap editor i started developing in 2005, initially for J2ME games (i made a racing game with this) but after that for a bunch of other projects. Until recently it was available only as SVN exports but now that i finally fixed most issues and filled most holes, its ready for a public release. Since i'm a lazy person instead of rewriting the same stuff using different words, here is the announcement i made in tigsource (thanks to bbcode being some sort of standard and stuff):

Ok, i mentioned Slashstone Mapas, my 2D tile map editor a bunch of times in threads from those who needed a tile map editor. However in all these cases the common part was: ...but you need to compile it. So i decided that this shouldn't be the case any more and people should get binaries. And as a plus, Slashstone Mapas got a bunch of new features and most holes from previous versions were filled. The binaries can be downloaded from the site above, near the source code from SVN.

Also here is a new screenshot of the program:


And a video showing the editor in a small quick video tutorial (flash): click here to see

Some notable new features are:
* Relations! You can 'draw' relations between tiles and give them a name. How you use them, depends on your engine but imagine drawing an arrow from a monster to a key and naming it 'drop'. Your engine can parse this and make the monster drop the key once killed. Instead of imaging it, just see the editor . Use Alt+left-click-drag to make a relation.
* TWO exporter plugins. One exports a simple map format which contains the whole map data using predefined IDs for each image (so you can share it between tools). The other exports a very simplistic format which uses the names of the images. So basically it looks like:

rock rock rock rock grass grass grass rock rock grass gras ..
rock rock gem rock rock grass grass tree grass rock ...
...

I believe this is the easiest to parse. If not, well the exporter's code is documented so it can be used as a base/example for writing your own exporter plugin.
* More precise zooming and now you can zoom out more than 100%. That is you can see the map in 50% zoom, 45% zoom, etc (before you could only zoom in, not zoom 'out').
* Finally bothered to add scrollbars in the tile lists
* Custom flags for each tile. Ctrl+Click shows the flag dialog. A plugin can modify the flag names.
* Popup menu with additional options. Ctrl+Right-click shows the popup menu. One option deletes all relations associated with the tile and another replaces all instances of the tile with random tiles selected from the active tiles box.
* More stuff i don't remember.

Comments? Suggestions? Bugs?

Note: for those interested here is the .mapas file shown in the video, which shows how the format looks like. You can use STTD (for Java) or libbadcfg (for C/C++) to parse the files (basically make a tree structure with their contents) or just write your own parser (the format is very simple). An alternative would be to use on of the two included exporters (i also plan to make an optional XML exporter) or even better use the NameMapExporter plugin as a base to write your own that writes directly to your engine's format (or even generates source code as it is the case with my RayFaster haXe engine).

[David]

Nice work! I'll definitely have a look at the code... After work!

[Josh1billion]

Looks very cool, especially the "relations" feature, but have you written any playback libraries for it or must we write our own?

[Bad Sector]

You must write your own

Its not a game editor, its just a generic tilemap editor i used in several unrelated games/engines (and recently others started to use). Personally i used it in a couple of mobile phone games, a javascript-based "game engine", a Flash 8 sidescrolling engine (with an external tool that "baked" all layers in a single tilemap), a Flash 9 3D engine, a Flash 9 puzzle game (i will post it soon - its finished i just need to reupload the site on another server), a proof of concept for an action/puzzle i'm making for some other people and a bunch of other tests, engines, etc.

Its worth to note that none of the above engines fully support the features provided by the editor: all of them only support  a subset. The only exception is the relations feature which i  haven't used yet in any game (i was making this for the "Wizard" game shown in the shot above, but never wrote any line of code for this project).

In the development version (not released yet and i haven't uploaded it to the SVN either) there is finally the ability to use images of any size. There is a "master tile size" of course (which is used as the grid), but you can use other image sizes (of course placement is still done in the master size). There are some bugs there since the editor currently uses the master size almost everywhere but i will sort it out at some point.