Tiled 0.6.0 released

Announcing a new release within a few weeks unfortunately ended up as not much more than an April Fools' joke. However, more than a year after our last release, Tiled 0.6.0 finally made it. It is probably our most stable release ever. New features include internationalization, stamp brush functionality, rewritten preferences code (no more tiled.conf) and a JSON export plugin. A small change was made to the map format. In all cases, the properties are now wrapped in a properties element.

• Added internationalization, with translations to Dutch, German, Italian, French and Spanish
• Added stamp function for pencil: right-click, drag now creates a stamp for easy copying
• Added more error-checking to XMLMapTransformer, the default map reader
• Added global properties for tilesets (properties set for all tiles)
• Added the ability to merge tile images when layers are merged
• Added more useful visual feedback for some brushes
• Added remembering of main window state as suggested by Dennis Spreen
• Added remembering of size and divider position to tile palette dialog
• Added memory usage display and a garbage collect button to the about dialog
• Added JSON exporter plugin by Nader Akhres
• Improved memory usage and speed in several areas
• Fixed new tileset dialog so that it is now possible to change the tile height to something other than the tile height used by the map
• Fixed a bug when exporting a tileset with an external image
• Fixed two cases of hanging when using the fill tool
• Fixed tile palette bug of not accounting for gaps in tile ids
• Fixed tile palette bug of displaying multiple tilesets over eachother
• Fixed bug of adding a new tile even if cancelling out of new tile dialog
• Fixed NullPointerException when saving a map with no extension
• Fixed the zooming so that it keeps the center in place
• Fixed exiting even when a request to save the changes failed
• Fixed layer merging so that undo/redo of operation is functional
• Fixed resetting of selected tileset in tile palette on layer rearrangements
• Fixed saving of tile properties when using a tileset image
• Fixed loading of invisible layers
• Fixed saving of tile spacing property for tileset images
• Fixed configuring, saving and loading of maps using embedded images
• Rewrote configuration based on the Preferences class, no more tiled.conf
• Cleaned up TileSet (removed checksumming and rotation/orientation code)
• Removed experimental hexagonal mapview from new map dialog
• Removed option to not automatically create tiles from a tileset image
• Changed map format to store properties within a single "properties" element

Website moves to mapeditor.org

We've registered our own domain and moved our website from http://tiled.rpgdx.net/ to our new location at http://mapeditor.org/. Be sure to update your bookmarks! ;-)

Recently there has been some progress towards a new Tiled release, which is expected to be released within a few weeks. Improvements will include bugfixes and internationalization. We also hope to include some new features, but unfortunately we are still rather short on time. Note that if you are using Tiled and would like to work on some improvements, do not hesitate to contact us.

Tiled 0.5.1 released

Tiled 0.5.1 is certainly late, and thus a number of requests have built up while we've been busy with other projects. It is a step closer to the stability we hope to achieve, and it adds some of the features that have been asked for.

• Added a checkerboard background to tileset palette
• Added support for layer locking (not editable when locked)
• Added support for tmx.gz map files
• Added selection addition and substraction via Shift and Ctrl respectively
• Improved the drawing speed thanks to some thorough testing and suggestions (Jerome Blouin)
• Improved transformation so that it respects selections
• Fixed the "Save As Image" feature to use current zoom level
• Fixed drawing on invisible layers
• Fixed selection rectangle to include one more tile
• Fixed loading of plugins that only do export and no import
• Fixed removing tilesets in the Tileset Manager
• Fixed image loading to ensure hardware acceleration is used where possible in Java 1.4 and above (Jerome Blouin)
• Fixed a NullPointerException when loading TSX files as imported tilesets
• Fixed an "Unsupported protocol" error when loading TMX files which referenced an external tileset under certain conditions
• Fixed a ClassCastException when loading GIFs as tilesets

Tiled 0.5.0 released

Tiled 0.5.0 marks the biggest update since 0.3.0, but unfortunately it's not as big as we had wanted it to be. Object support didn't make it in and the new tile image handling still leaves things to be desired. However, a lot of improvements have been made in other areas like for example much more options for the brush, masked tileset support, cursor highlighting and a whole bunch of fixes. Here comes the full list:

• Added width and height attributes to layer element
• Added layer properties, analoguous to tile and map properties
• Added a version attribute to the map tag
• Added a basedir attribute to the tileset tag (suggested by Radomir Dopieralski)
• Added support for shared images (merged in Rainer Deyke's shared images code)
• Added support for masked tileset images
• Added support for highlighting tile under cursor
• Added support for creating an image snapshot of the map
• Added additional zoom levels (by Marc Ilgen)
• Added background color option (by Marc Ilgen)
• Added option to show coordinates on each tile (suggested by Ahmed Mohombe)
• Added an option whether to automatically create tiles from tileset images upon import or not.
• Added support for reading TMX/TSX files from URLs
• Added the RandomBrush for doing 'spray-paint' painting (suggested by Rainer Deyke)
• Added the brush dialog, and support for a wide range of brush operations (Nephilim, Rainer Deyke, et al.)
• Added a message framework for reporting load/save problems to the user
• Improved GUI in several places
• Improved TMX loading, it is now much more forgiving
• Optimized rendering of isometric maps
• Completed the Search/Replace dialog
• Changed the MultisetListRenderer to show tiles actual-size when selected
• Generalized the dialogs for properties and added delete capabilities.
• Fixed determining the relative path to tileset images
• Fixed some old things in the DTD (suggested by Radomir Dopieralski)
• Fixed drawing artifacts in selections
• Fixed Copy, Cut, and Paste menu options to be disabled when no map is loaded
• Fixed cancelling Save As operation still saving the map
• Fixed inverting selections

Mailing lists

For a while we were already using a tiled-commit mailing list to send around changes made to the code. Since today, there is also a tiled-user mailing list for the users.

We made this move because of the increasing number of people using Tiled. Questions and discussions on the list are archived and users will be able to share information or learn about each other's problems. It would also be a place where we can ask users feedback on new things we plan to add to Tiled, and to do announcements about new versions of Tiled.

Tiled 0.4.2 released

In this release, added stability and functionality of features from 0.4.1 have been made. Search/replace and hexagonal maps are still considered experimental.

• Added a JNLP for WebStart, contributed by Chris Hazen
• Added a simple plugin for the Mappy FMAP format maps
• Added a plugin dialog for information about plugins
• Added plugin target for building bundled plugins
• Removed API usage deprecated by Java 5.0
• Fixed a NullPointerException when loading plugins
• Fixed layer naming on undo (issue #75)

Tiled 0.4.1 released

This release brings some stability and usability improvements, along with a few new features that are still a bit experimental like selections, search/replace and hexagonal maps.

• Added search/replace functionality
• Added tooltips to buttons
• Added map save/load plugin support
• Added marquee selections
• Added HexMapView, contributed by Andreas Mross (experimental)
• Removed name and version attributes from map, custom properties suffice there
• Removed name attribute from tile for same reason
• More intelligent starting locations for file choosers
• Grid display is now configurable (opacity, antialiasing)
• Fixes to tileset editing dialog
• Fixed config file saving to stop adding newlines to the config file
• Fixed window close button to behave the same as File->Exit
• Fixed undo/redo for moving layers
• Fixed moving a duplicated layer to no longer move original too

Thanks go to Ahmed Mohombe and Andreas Mross for their feedback and suggestions! Andreas also contributed code for hexagonal maps, expect improvements to this new map view in later versions.