New Tiled website launched

The past month I've been working on a new website for Tiled. The new site communicates better what the main features of Tiled are and improves the visibility of links to related pages and available download options. I also hope you agree it looks a lot better!

An important change I made is to make the option to donate more obvious. My spare time has been very limited since my daughter was born, which will get even worse when the paternity leave runs out (which currently allows me to work part-time for a few months). So, my plan is that when enough people donate to Tiled regularly, I will switch my current full time job to part-time permanently, and spend the freed up time on Tiled instead.

This means the donations will no longer be only a motivation for me to work on Tiled (which can be frustrating when I don't actually have the time), but they will contribute directly to the amount of time I will be able to spend on further Tiled development. The more that comes in, the less I will depend on my current job so the more time I will have for Tiled. I found the most suitable service for this is Gittip, which allows anybody to start or stop contributing at any time and does not charge additional fees. Other options and a rough future roadmap are provided on the Donate page.

With the new homepage, this blog is now a little more in the background. However, I plan to use it more actively so instead of only announcing the new releases I can write a little about new features when they are done for example, or highlight projects related to Tiled. Something in between what the blog was until now and the Google+ page (where of course new blog posts will also be shared).

I'm excited about this new period in Tiled's development. I hope you are too!

Tiled Qt 0.9.0 released

At long last there is a new feature release of Tiled! Ever since 0.8 was released new features have kept accumulating at pretty much the usual pace, so there is a lot of new stuff in this one. It's hard to pick favourites, so I'll only highlight a couple.

Several new dockable windows have been added. There's now a file system view, an object list and a mini-map. These should really help navigating your ever growing world.

Also, many improvements have been made to the automapping system, which can now produce object layers and apply rules while editing. New in this area is the terrain tool, which really helps if its corner-based algorithm works with your tiles.

Here follows the full list of changes:

• Added objects dock and per-object visibility toggle (by Tim Baker)
• Added maps dock (by Tim Baker)
• Added terrain tool for automatic terrain transitions (by Manu Evans)
• Added a minimap (by Christoph Schnackenberg)
• Added a staggered isometric map renderer, still without object layer support
• Added basic image layer support (by Gregory Nickonov and Alexander Kuhrt)
• Added display of current layer to the status bar (by Tim Baker)
• Added editable combo box for changing the zoom level (by Tim Baker)
• Added support for multiple input layers to automapping (by Stefan Beller)
• Added option to apply automapping rules while editing (by Stefan Beller)
• Added a converter to update old automapping rules (by Stefan Beller)
• Added support for objects layers to automapping (by Stefan Beller)
• Added support for random mode to the fill tool (by Stefan Beller)
• Added Replica Island plugin (by Eric Kidd)
• Added option to change the grid color (by Stefan Beller)
• Added support for ellipse objects (by devnewton and Christoph Schnackenberg)
• Added name labels for objects on isometric maps (by Andrew Motrenko)
• Added map property for changing the background color (by Emmanuel Barroga)
• Added shortcut to manually reload tilesets (Ctrl-T) (by Michael Williams)
• Added toggle for showing tile object outlines
• Added support for pinch zooming (by Pierre-David Bélanger)
• Added initial (non-GUI) support for individual and/or embedded tile images (by Petr Viktorin)
• Added reading support to Flare plugin (by Stefan Beller)
• Added a TMX rasterizer command line tool (by Vincent Petithory)
• Added man pages and desktop file (by Erik Schilling)
• Made the size and position of most dialogs persistent
• Respect the original layer data format of a loaded map (by Ben Longbons)
• Marked Tiled as high-resolution capable on Mac OS X
• Improved handling of external tilesets in Lua export
• Reverted tilesets view back to tabs, but with menu button (by Stefan Beller)
• Allowed plugins to support multiple file name filters (by Samuli Tuomola)
• Allow saving in any format that can also be read (by Stefan Beller)
• Fixed eraser skipping tiles when moving fast
• Fixed bug in Flare plugin (by Clint Bellanger)
• Fixed compile against Qt 5 (by Kenney Phillis)
• Fixed resolving of symbolic links while loading map
• Fixed a crash that could happen after trying to load a faulty map
• Updated Portuguese, Dutch, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Japanese, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Hebrew and Czech translations (thanks to all translators!)

As evident by the above changelog, this release is the result of a record number of contributors (a total of 33 since 0.8.1). A big thanks to everybody who opened pull requests and persisted through the code reviews!

For authors of frameworks and libraries supporting the TMX format, I've summarized the additions on the wiki.

Tiled Qt 0.8.1 released

The 0.8 branch had slowly been accumilating fixes and translation updates that made it worth to release Tiled Qt 0.8.1. Upgrading is highly recommended since there was a crash related to pasting. Also noteworthy is the improved support for mice with fine-resolution wheels like the Magic Mouse. Thanks to all who contributed, and also thanks to Jeff Bland for updating the Mac release!

• Added MacOS X Lion full screen support (by Vsevolod Klementjev)
• Fixed crash that could happen when painting with a pasted stamp
• Fixed zoom sensitivity for finer-resolution mouse wheels
• Fixed issues when using quickstamps in combination with the fill tool
• Fixed stamp tool not to miss tiles when drawing fast (by Stefan Beller)
• Fixed automapping to work with external tilesets (by Stefan Beller)
• Fixed crash in automapping when dealing with broken rule files (by Stefan Beller)
• Fixed object type getting erased on pressing Enter
• Changed the license of libtiled-java from LGPL to BSD
• Updated Italian and Hebrew translations (by Gornova and Tamir Atias)

Meanwhile, new features are being added for the next feature release. Recently support for image layers was added and the bucket fill tool can now do random fills. Install a daily build or compile Tiled from master to try them out. Your contributions are also welcome!

Follow Tiled on Google+ to hear about interesting news related to Tiled, or share your Tiled-related story.

Updated Ubuntu packages and daily builds

Thanks to the efforts of Erik Schilling, there are once again updated Tiled packages available for all recent versions of Ubuntu (or derivatives like Mint). Not only this, but the new official PPA also contains a tiled-daily package that is updated whenever changes are pushed into the repository.

Actually daily builds for Windows have been available since a long time, thanks to Stefan Beller. I've now added a link to these to the sidebar as well.

If you want to see what's new in the daily builds, keep an eye on the commit log of the master branch, on which these builds are based.

Tiled Qt 0.8.0 released

If all you wanted for Christmas was a new Tiled release, it's time to start thinking about a new present!

This release adds some major new features like polygon objects, JSON import and export, tile rotation and drawing offset. Many smaller changes and additions were made as well, so there should be something for everybody. The full list of changes:

• Added support for polygon and polyline objects (sponsored by Zipline Games)
• Added support for tile rotation (by Wade Brainerd)
• Added support for defining the color of custom object types (sponsored by Zipline Games)
• Added a Delete action to delete selected tiles or objects (by Stefan Beller)
• Added random mode to the stamp brush (by Stefan Beller)
• Added Flare export plugin (by Stefan Beller and Clint Bellanger)
• Added JSON plugin that supports both reading and writing (by Porfírio Ribeiro)
• Added ability to rename tilesets (by Maus)
• Added a mode in which the current layer is highlighted
• Added support for specifying a tile drawing offset (sponsored by Clint Bellanger)
• Added a shortcut (Alt+C) to copy the current tile position to clipboard (by Stefan Beller)
• Added a command line option to disable OpenGL
• Allow custom properties on tilesets
• Many automapping improvements (by Stefan Beller)
• Improved tileset dock to handle a large amount of tilesets better (by Maus)
• Made the 'Show Grid' option in the tileset view persistent
• Raised the tile size limit in the New Tileset dialog from 999 to 9999
• Correctly handle changes in the width of a tileset image (by Adam Rippon)
• Worked around a long standing crash bug
• Added Russian translation (by Alex Vega)
• Updated the German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French and Brazilian Portuguese translations (thanks to all translators!)

As the above list shows, many of the new features were either sponsored or developed by contributors, thanks a lot to all who've helped shape this release!

Tiled Qt 0.7.1 released

Work is well underway on a future 0.8.0 release, but meanwhile also some bugs have been fixed that made it worth releasing 0.7.1. This release also updates the Czech translation and changes the way maps are exported to Lua so that they no longer rely on a global "map" variable.

• Select stamp tool when selecting tiles in tileset view (by Stefan Beller)
• Enable anti-aliasing in OpenGL mode
• Small improvement to the Lua export plugin (incompatible!)
• Fixed a bug in the Create Object tool that could lead to a crash
• Fixed reading of maps without tilesets but with a tile layer
• Fixed position of tile objects to center on the mouse on insertion
• Updated the Czech translation (by Petr Viktorin)

Tiled Qt 0.7.0 released

Tiled currently seems to be on a biannual release schedule regarding its new feature releases, though this is entirely unintentional. The important part is that quite some nice features have been developed again!

It's now finally possible to select multiple objects and copy/paste them. A bunch of other productivity enhancements were also made like cropping to selection, shortcuts to change layer, improved hand scrolling with spacebar, toggling visibility of other layers, etc.

A new feature was added that required changing the map format a little as well. Tiled is now able to flip tiles horizontally and vertically (using the 'x' and 'y' keys repectively). This information is stored in the highest two bits of the global tile IDs, so that tile layer data remains compatible if you don't use this feature.

The full list of changes:

• Added support for horizontal and vertical flipping of tiles (sponsored by Zipline Games)
• Added copy/paste support for objects
• Added merge layer down action
• Added Show or Hide all Other Layers action (by Christophe Conceicao)
• Added actions to select the previous/next layer
• Added Crop to Selection action
• Added a Lua export plugin (sponsored by Zipline Games)
• Added Droidcraft plugin to read and export the map files (by seeseekey)
• Added option to turn off grid in the tileset view (by Gregory Nickonov)
• Added hand scrolling while holding the spacebar
• Made the object context menu available in all object tools
• Display tile coordinates also when using object tools
• Various improvements to running external commands (by Jeff Bland)
• Automapping stability and memory consumption improvements (by Stefan Beller)
• Objects that fall outside of the map on resize are now removed (by Stefan Beller)
• Fixed problems with watching tilesets multiple times
• Fixed several issues related to restoring previously opened files (by Stefan Beller)
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, German, Spanish, Japanese, Hebrew, Portuguese, Dutch and French translations (thanks to all translators!)

Lastly I want to say, Tiled is shaped by your feedback and those who help improve it. If you have an itch or a suggestion, please do report an issue. Or better yet, fork Tiled on github and work with us on the next release!