Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Tiled covered in "Learning iOS Game Programming"

Michael Daley from 71Squared recently published his book Learning iOS Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building Your First iPhone Game. The cool thing about this book, aside from showing you how to make a game start to end, is that it covers how to use Tiled to create your maps and how to use the created maps in your game.

Learning iOS Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building Your First iPhone Game (Developer's Library)

I've personally had the pleasure of reviewing the Tile Maps chapter in Michael's book. While I couldn't look too deep into the code (I'm not familiar with Objective-C), I can say that apart from showing how to use Tiled, it goes into detail about how to parse Tiled's XML based map format and how to render it using OpenGL.

If you're interested in buying the book, please use the provided links, thanks!

10 comments:

  1. You can see my game with a loader that i created for MapEditor - in ActionScript3:

    http://flashpunk.net/forums/index.php?topic=905.0

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  2. Hi!
    I have a question about support for hexagonal maps. Is it possible that you will add this type to program? If you want I can translate your program on Polish.

    Have a nice day,
    Peter

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  3. @paulo.coutinho

    It seems I need a FaceBook account to see your game now? I checked it out before and walked around a bit, looked nice!

    @Piotr

    Support for hexagonal maps is certainly possible, but it may take a while before I get around to it. A Polish translation would of course be awesome.

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  4. Congratulations! I just love TME, and it became part of my framework now, thanks! I would really love TGA file support, can this be possible? Thanks!

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  5. @pablo-remate

    Note that there is another map editor called TME, so please don't call this one TME, to avoid confusion. This one is called Tiled.

    About supporting TGA, since the latest version of Tiled is based on Qt it means Qt would have to support TGA. On my system it doesn't, but maybe there's a Qt image i/o plugin available for this. KDE seems to have one, at least:

    http://api.kde.org/4.0-api/kdelibs-apidocs/kimgio/html/classTGAHandler.html

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  6. I am using TGA tiles with alpha channel(several layers), I convert them to PNG to see them in Tiled, however, it seems Tiled doesn't support alpha channels, I mean I have tiles where the alpha channel value is 0 and I would expect to see the underlying layer but this doesn't happen, it would be so nice if Tiled supports alpha channel tiles! Thanks again, I love Tiled!

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  7. @pablo-remate

    Actually Tiled already supports alpha channel. Look for example at the isometric.tmx example. Maybe you are drawing your transparent tiles to the same layer as the underlying layer, instead of in an additional tile layer on top?

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  8. I use 32 bbp files with four channels RGBA, and Tiled is just ignoring the alpha(fourth) channel, I took a look at the isometric example, opened the PNG file in Photoshop and saw there was no alpha channel, however, the background had no colors asgined, it seems this is the way Tiled uses to skip pixels. However, this is not what I was talking about, by alpha channel I meant to be able to support 256 levels of opacity. It would be possible for Tiled to read the alpha information from the alpha channel in order to support 256 levels of opacity?

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  9. Sorry my bad!, I just tried to convert from PNG to TGA ignoring the differences between these formats, unfortunately I'll have to wait for someone to add TGA support to Tiled.

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  10. Not at all like such a large number of books that help you make simply a space rocks clone,this book helps you make a role playing game on the iPhone/iPod touch platform and its well composed and simple to take after and alludes you to such a variety of accommodating projects that support in game programming for the iPhone.There's likewise a well disposed forum on the off chance that you need help.I got both the print and digital edition so I can load the digital book in my Nook for Mac and take after the code online and the print edition so I could read it on the tram since I don't generally have a physical hideout -simply alcove for Mac . : )
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>>>>>>
    Super Hero-iOS Game

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