Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Tiled Qt 0.6.0 released

It's been more than half a year after the last major release, but meanwhile development of Tiled has continued as usual, as is evident by the many new features in this release. The improvements include support for multiple documents, initial support for object selection, support for placing tiles as objects and centering the map when it's smaller than the view.

Of note is also the enhanced integration with MacOS X. The tmx file type is now recognised and associated with Tiled, allowing them to be opened from the Finder or by dragging them to the Tiled icon on the dock.

There was a license change of the core classes of Tiled (those in libtiled), which are now BSD licensed. This should be convenient for those who wish to use those classes in their (Qt/C++) project. For Java projects, Tiled now ships with a libtiled-java, which is a somewhat cleaned up version of the core classes from Tiled Java. For both libraries there are simple tmx viewer applications that show how to use them.

Full summary of the changes:

  • Added support for opening multiple maps in one session
  • Added support for placing tiles as objects
  • Added automatic mapping feature, allowing placing of tiles based on rules
  • Added ability to save/restore up to 9 stamps with Ctrl+[number]
  • Added an object selection tool, allowing moving/deleting multiple objects
  • Added ability to run external commands
  • Added support for drawing lines and ellipses with the stamp brush
  • Added icons to distinguish tile layers from object layers
  • Added "Move To Layer" submenu to the context menu of objects
  • Added option to use hardware rendering based on OpenGL
  • Added a T-Engine4 map export plugin
  • Added a simple TMX viewer application (BSD licensed)
  • Added a New Layer dropdown menu to the layers dock
  • Added a checkbox that enables snap to grid permanently
  • Added an initial version of libtiled-java (LGPL licensed)
  • Added Chinese and Hebrew translations
  • Allowed dragging an image onto Tiled to add a tileset
  • Center the map when it is smaller than the map view
  • Remember the selected layer across restarts
  • Changed the default layer data format to use zlib rather than gzip
  • Store the tileset image width and height in the map file
  • Compile fixes related to linking zlib
  • Fixed the current stamp to get updated when switching tilesets
  • Fixed the maximum sizes of the resize map dialog
  • Fixed build issues when an older version of libtiled is installed
  • Fixed saving of property when clicking OK while editing on MacOS X
  • Allow Backspace to delete properties to make it easier on a MacBook
  • Associate tmx files with Tiled on MacOS X
  • Changed the license of libtiled from GPL to BSD
  • Updated Czech, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch and French translations

Finally I want to thank everybody who contributed to this release! Significant work was done by Stefan Beller on the multi-document support, improvements to the stamp tool, the quick stamps and the new automatic mapping feature. Jeff Bland helped to improve Tiled for MacOS X and added support for running arbitrary commands from Tiled. Bin Wu and Zhao Sting provided a Chinese translation and Tamir Atias translated Tiled to Hebrew (its first right-to-left language). Also thanks to all the translators who updated their translation!

Warning: This version of Tiled changes the default compression method for layer data from gzip to zlib. The latter is more suitable for in-memory compression while gzip was meant for files. In most environments, zlib is easier to deal with (especially in C/C++, but also in Python). If your map reader does not support zlib, you can still tell Tiled to use gzip in the preferences.