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.

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!

Tiled Qt 0.5.1 released

It came to my attention that some users were still using Tiled Qt 0.3.1 because of a regression in saving object position and size when the tile width is different from the tile height. Well, we can't have that so I've released 0.5.1 which fixes this issue. The Czech translation was also updated, thanks to Petr Viktorin!

Tiled Qt 0.5.0 released

At long last I managed to finish another release, with the main aim to add the last glaring missing features compared to the old Java version. This included mostly tileset management, and support for input/output plugins.

There have also been some new contributors. Andrew G. Crowell made the layer actions accessible via a right-click menu and in a small toolbar. Michael Woerister enhanced the object properties dialog with additional fields to change the position and size. Finally, Janis Kirsteins added a Latvian translation. Thanks! Also thanks to all the existing translators who have updated their translation to the new release! The full list of changes:

• Added support for import and export plugins
• Added support for external tilesets
• Added undo for adding tilesets and ability to remove tilesets
• Added error handling to the New Tileset dialog
• Added ability to change tileset order by dragging them around
• Added option to draw the tile grid when saving as image
• Added a context menu and tool buttons to the layer dock
• Added Latvian translation
• Added an install target to the Makefile
• Open local files when they are dropped onto Tiled
• Allow changing position and size of objects in the Object Properties dialog
• Fixed rendering issues with tiles wider than the tile width of the map
• Fixed eraser and fill tool working on invisible layers
• Fixed a crash when using some tools when no map is loaded
• Fixed compile errors related to detecting static builds
• Fixed the Save dialog not suggesting any particular file extension
• Updated Japanese, Dutch, German, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Portuguese and Spanish translations

As needed to allow plugins, part of Tiled is now in a small shared library. In the future I intend to also move the map reader and renderer into this library so that it can be re-used by games implemented using Qt. I'm also adding a Java version of this library.

Tiled Qt 0.4.1 released

This release adds a lot of new translations as well as a few small features. New is the support for storing layer data as CSV (comma separated values), contributed by Dennis Honeyman. Also, Jeff Bland extended the fill tool to fill the selection when Shift is pressed. The full list of noteworthy changes:

• Added support for saving tile layer data as CSV
• Added shift modifier to bucket fill tool for filling the selection
• Added Brazilian Portugese, Japanese, French, Italian and Czech translations
• Made values used in the New Map and New Tileset dialogs persistent
• Fixed drawing selection highlight where brush is not painting
• Fixed an incompatibility with Tiled Java in 'trans' attribute

Thanks to Jonatas de Moraes Junior, Hiroki Utsunomiya, Yohann Ferreira, Antonio Ricci and Petr Viktorin for the new translations!

Tiled Qt 0.4.0 released

With this release the Qt version of Tiled finally replaces the Java version, being on par with the most important features and more advanced in other areas. The Java version will of course remain available as well, and is still open for new maintainership.

The most important features added in this release are support for isometric maps and finalized support for translations, with translations to Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and German already complete. Also, several nice features have been contributed by other developers, including a fill tool and automatic reloading of tileset images. The full list of changes:

• Added support for isometric maps
• Added automatic reloading of tileset images when they change
• Added "offset map" action that can shift a set of layers by a certain amount
• Added a fill tool
• Added ability to duplicate map objects
• Added support for choosing the tile layer data format used when saving
• Added mouse wheel zooming support to the tileset view
• Added an object display color attribute to object groups
• Added ability to edit tile properties through a context menu
• Made writing out a DTD reference optional and disabled it by default
• Made translations functional
• Updated Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and German translations

For the next version I'd like to finish support for plugins as well as add tileset management (including proper support for external tilesets), which are two areas in which the Java version is still ahead. There are plenty of other possibilities though, and your help is greatly appreciated!