People who code: we want your input. Take the Survey

# Tag Info

64

I'd disagree with the accepted answer here. I'd call this an autotile, and not a 9-slice "9-Slice" (or 9-patch) is usually used to refer to a system where the content creator slices the image along 4 lines (not necessarily equally-spaced tiles). When rendering a rectangle, the corner slices are displayed at their native size, and the edges/center are ...

45

This guide didn't exist when the question was asked, but here's my guide to hex grid math: Hexagonal Grids

40

A name that will give you actual results in Google is 9-slice. Another way to call it and ask Google about it is 9-patch. As per this chat discussion, 9-pane seems to also be used, but the almighty Google will not show you what you need, unless you're into windows or something. Thanks to Kevin and Josh in chat for that.

34

There's a solid overview of different popular tile combination patterns put together by Boris the Brave, building on some earlier work by Sean Howard. I'll briefly summarize the main categories these authors identify in case the links break in future, along with a few additions of my own. I recommend you read the original articles for the full details. Rug ...

31

Yes, the Manhattan distance between two points is always the same, just like the regular distance between them. You can think of the Manhattan distance being the X and Y components of a line running between the two points. This image (from Wikipedia) illustrates this well: The green line is the actual distance. The blue, red and yellow lines all represent ...

25

You could use perlin noise, which is normaly used for heightmap generation. Perlin noise in games Then you could use the heights as an adviser, how high the chance of grass/dirt occuring in one region of the map is. Example (Perlin noise values from 0-256): If the value is over 200 the chance that grass is placed is 80% (dirt 20%). If the value is between ...

23

What you could do is randomly generate a Voronoi map like this: Picking random center points (see the black dots) and randomly decide if they are grass or dirt. Then for over all tiles, check if it's closest to a center point of dirt or a grass. Done! If what you did previously is "flip a coin" for each tile (noise), generating a Voronoi diagram will ...

16

Layers are needed not only the most basic use of a tile map, but also allow more artistic expression and play features. Layers define the draw order of the sprites used in your world. They're simply a way to say, "Draw sprite X after sprite Y, so that sprite X will appear on top of sprite Y". They're typically generalized into layers so you don't need to ...

12

Most simple (and probably most naive) approach I can think of right now: Start at your character and mark all surrounding fields as steps - 1. Iterate over all newly marked fields and once again mark their surrounding fields as steps - 1 where steps would be the current field's step number, unless the new field has an already higher number. Repeat the last ...

12

One thing I've done in the past for island shapes is to use perlin noise minus a circular shape. It usually produces one big island and some little things off on the side. You can use flood fill or smoothing to remove any small noise. Here's a demo (flash) that I wrote for this question. For each location (x, y) in the noise bitmap, compute the distance ...

12

Going to try and doodle up what I mean here as soon as I finish typing this, but: What about merging the two? Use the second (occlude by base) for everything that isn't a wall and the first (occlude by tops) for lighting the walls? You actually did this by accident in your second example, with the wall that goes off the bottom of the image. Extending ...

11

To actually answer your question: the manhatten distance is consistent when you're constrained to moving vertically/horizonally along an unweighted grid (this can be easily shown by the definition on wikipedia). So yes, in your case you can avoid rechecking nodes in the closed set. However, once you allow diagonal or any-angle movement, manhatten distance ...

10

Go to piskelapp.com , then choose 'Create new Piskel'. Click the menu on the right, and choose import your own image; select it, then put the number of size of each tile. After you are done editing, choose Export in separate images. Done!

9

You can create tiled maps on without using .tmx. TiledMap map = new TileMap(); MapLayers layers = map.getLayers(); TiledMapTileLayer layer1 = new TiledMapTileLayer(width, height, tile_width, tile_height); Cell cell = new Cell(); cell.setTile(new StaticTiledMapTile(texture_region)); layer1.setCell(x, y, cell); layers.addLayer(layer1); Each of these ...

9

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/generate-random-cave-levels-using-cellular-automata--gamedev-9664 here is my version of the cellular automata method start by filling the grid with random then run these cullular automata rules on it a couple times If a living cell has less than two living neighbours, it dies. If a living cell has two or three ...

9

Tiles and icons (even in UIs like window systems) are often in a size like 16x16 or 24x24 to make it easier to modify the tiles. Most times the tile size is a multiple of 8 because of the folowing reasons. It is relatively easy to shrink a tile with the size 32x32 to 16x16 by simply putting 4 pixels together (e.g. create the median/average of the 4 pixels). ...

8

This is a basic connected components problem, and can be solved with a single invocation of breadth-first or depth-first search, or any flood-fill algorithm. bool IsOneSolidShape(TileCollection tiles) { // Clear visited flags on all tiles. // (This can also be implemented as a temporary set/map or parallel array, // if you prefer not to clutter ...

8

I will present a general concept and three solutions using that concept. Concept is an Influence map: For each location in the map, you are going to store a number that represent the distance to each color point. That way, for each position you can query how far it is from blue, red, green, etc. We call the result is the influence map. For more detail on the ...

7

Eric Lippert wrote an excellent series on generating line-of-sight in C# with Shadow Casting on a rectangular planar grid.. Amongst other issues, Eric dealt with various questions that must be answered about the line-of-sight requirements, which give different results, and gives examples of a couple of different results. One of the articles deals in depth ...

7

I'd consider a Square-based grid as a "base" type of tiles in any game. Such grid is simple to imagine and moves over this grid are simple to understand. It's also very simple to implement "under the hood". Those are few reasons why even the Chess game uses it :). Additionally, this grid helps you make "regular" levels, because Vertical and Horizontal are ...

7

Select a point on the map. Place desired tile type with a base value such as 40. Keep track of where you placed your newly desired tile. Add the starting point to a list. For each point in this list, you visit all neighbours. While you have enough power left (started at 40) add a desired tile and add it to the list to be visited. Give the new tile less ...

7

Sounds like you're after something like a flood fill algorithm. Basically, something like the following algorithm (you can see other examples on the wikipedia page): 1. Add your castle to the Checklist 2. Get the first item from the Checklist 3. For each surrounding position 4. If not on Complete list 5. If 0 add to Checklist 6. If 1 ...

7

I start with coordinate systems — the coordinates for grid locations are (x,y) but as Krom mentioned in a different answer, for walls there can be up to two walls for each grid location. That leads to a second coordinate system, for edges between tiles. In this article I used West and South so the edges can be (x,y,West) or (x,y,South), but you can pick two ...

6

You are on the right track. Consider Minecraft. Minecraft only loads the areas (also called chunks) immediately surrounding players. This is how the server is able to run without running out of memory, and why clients don't get bogged down from network traffic. If it is a very low amount of information being sent between Client/Server, would it make ...

6

In extension of Byte56's answer I would like to point out, that in your specific data set, using the Manhattan Distance as your heuristic function will actually always be a perfect heuristic in the sense that it will always return the actual path cost (assuming there is nothing "blocking" the paths). You should also note, that all nodes in the correct ...

6

You are should look into auto tiling. There are two prevailing methods as to how to implement this. The first assigns a bit value to each tile type, tile_bit, and a bit value to each tile surrounding the location, loc_bit. Multiplying tile_bit by loc_bit will give a unique value for every combination of surrounding locations. This very simple to do with ...

6

Final answer, solved the performance problem! Changed my culling loop to this instead (based on the one used by Dice in BF3) uint threadCount = WORK_GROUP_SIZE * WORK_GROUP_SIZE; uint passCount = (numActiveLights + threadCount - 1) /threadCount; for (uint passIt = 0; passIt < passCount; ++passIt) { uint lightIndex = passIt * threadCount + ...

6

There are no strict definitions. It's true that the term tiles can apply to both data structure and visual representation. When people say "Tiles", they are just breaking the game into a regular grid, either logically (data structure) or visually (tiled images). It's probably more appropriate to only refer to tiles as the visual aspect (like real life ...

6

Have you considered using a 1D Perlin or simplex noise function? There are a number of advantages to this, including: Infinite (within the realm of floating-point precision), non-repeating terrain Can be generated real-time (even in a shader, which is fast), or ahead-of-time and stored in textures, as in your example Borders automatically match up as both ...

6

Because by default OpenGL can only wrap the entire texture (GL_REPEAT), and not just part of it, each tile is split off in to a separate texture. Then regions of the same tile are rendered adjacent to each other. Consider the display of an single, ordinary textured quad in OpenGL. Are there any seams, at any scale? No, never. Your goal is to get all ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible