[News] Upcoming tilemap editor for Arcade

Arcade
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Hey folks,

We’ve been working on a new experience for editing tilemaps in Arcade and it’s finally far enough along that I wanted to share a little teaser! Here’s a quick preview:

2019-12-02 16 47 10
2019-12-02 16 47 102066×1386

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New features (this list is subject to change):

  1. See your tiles in the editor: Instead of an image that maps to tiles, you can now see the tiles directly in the map you are editing
  2. 256 tiles per map: Up from the previous limit of 16
  3. Only one block required: No more assigning images to colors; tiles are created inside the same editor as the map and shared between all tilemaps in your project
  4. Draw walls anywhere: You can now paint walls directly onto the map
  5. Tile gallery: Use any of our built-in tile assets easily
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That looks outstanding! A highly welcome addition :slight_smile:

Can I ask for one thing, though? I have always found it useful to be able to create tile maps programmatically by creating an image - adding one pixel per tile made it easy and quick - so I’d love to have some additional API to do the same with this style of tile map, if there’s no other way to do it.

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There will still be APIs that can be used programmatically, but they might be JavaScript only. We’re still figuring out what we will surface in blocks.

All existing projects will continue working as they do now; we’ll be hiding the old blocks in the toolbox but they will stay if you already have them in your project. Those old APIs will also still be available in JavaScript but we’ll mark them as deprecated.

Programmatic tilemaps in blocks might be good as an extension (like animation is today).

3 Likes
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Works for me. Thank you!

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Thanks!!! Looks great!!!

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Awesome!!!

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That looks so good. A lot of the updates, like the new gallery images, look (to me at least) like a big platforming game, or a top-down dungeon crawler is in the works.

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Is it open to be used at the moment? I would very much LOVE to use it! :slight_smile: Looks great!

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It’s currently available in the beta version of the editor - https://arcade.makecode.com/beta

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Thanks! Look Great!

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I love the way that this looks and works but I’m having problems on my project with it. When I set it to use a TileScale of Eight, the walls don’t work and there are visual gaps between all the tiles. I know this is in beta still, so I just wanted to let you know that there seem to be some issues with it when it’s set to anything other than the default of 16.

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Thanks for reporting that issue, I’ll take a look at sizing issues after new years (if you have any examples where its clearly broken I’d love to see them so I can verify the fixes - feel free to post here or just send them to me if you don’t want to publicly share yet) - I think the tile scale feature was left in a slightly weird spot with the initial upgrades to the tilemap editor, already fixed a few other minor bugs with it.

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arcade-Deadly-Octopus-Island
Sure thing, here’s the file I’m working on. It’s very simple; I was just at the point of creating assets. Thanks for the quick response. I really love all the changes that are in progress. :slight_smile:

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It looks like this was fixed in the most recent update. Thanks for your work on it; all the new stuff is great!

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I found some 8x8 strangeness but I can’t test it as the code no longer loads ok in 0.16.1, detail in Is tile map ok in beta with 8x8 pixel tiles?

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It’s working for me as of right now. :slight_smile: