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Thread: TileStudio for Lazarus

  1. #1

    TileStudio for Lazarus

    Not sure if this is the place, so if moderators think it should be moved to another forum, do it.

    I'm sure a lot of you know about TileStudio; may be it's the best tilemap editor ever and it was developed with Delphi! Unfortunately it's Windows only and I didn't use Windows for a long time. I did try to use TS with Wine but it's exasperatedly slow, almost unusable (or it is it in my Xubuntu running in a core-duo; didn't test it in my "brand new" Debian, though). Since it's open-source I decided to port it to Lazarus. Mike Wiering didn't return the mails I sent and project seems dead, so I started by my own thinking it would be easy. But it wasn't at all.

    Now I have a version that compiles and "runs", but it's still too slow and raises "SEGMENT FAULT" too often so it's still unusable. It's hard to trace: The main window has hundreds of components, each one with its own events and a plethora of cross-references (for example: drawing-tool to drawing-style selector to color selector to palette selector to tile TDrawBox to tile-list panel...), and a lot of them doesn't have descriptive names, or the name is descriptive but actually it doesn't does what it says it does... Also it isn't "modular" and it mixes concepts that I would keep in separate modules.

    I think I have find why it's so slow: It has 3 Timers, one of them breaks each millisecond! I did changed the rate but then the program freezes and can't close it or raises a "SEGMENT FAULT" in random-like time. Actually I don't know what does it do but I think I can get it and fix it in the future.

    I know how I can improve it (i.e. move a lot of those hundreds of components from the main form to some TFrame [PaletteEditor, ImageEditor, MapEditor, TileSelector, etc.] then put that new TFrame in the main form, use TActionList to group actions, etc.) but it will need a lot of time and work, and currently I haven't much of that.

    Then, I'm asking if anybody has interest and may help. At the moment I don't want a "TileStudio 3.0", but port the current version. Since Wiering didn't answer my asking we should create a new project in SourceForge (I prefer SF), then plan the work. I'll be a bit busy next two months (until mid-September) so at start we'll go slowly.

    Comments, offers, suggestions...
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  2. #2

    Re: TileStudio for Lazarus

    I did a similar thing a couple of years ago. It was a "quick and dirt" porting, only to see if Lazarus was able to compile it. Well, it was The executable suffered from tearing redrawing things though, at least on Windows. Just haven't investigated too much to resolve the problem

    Maybe I have something on my backup disk... If so, I'll be glad to share it
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  3. #3

    Re: TileStudio for Lazarus

    That would be nice, Legolas. I can compare with my port.

    BTW, I was thinking and may be it's better to code it from the beginning. I mean keeping the ideas that makes TileStudio a good tool. Not sure yet.

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  4. #4

    Re: TileStudio for Lazarus

    It would be interesting to recreate the entire project, I suppose, but I already use different tools. Gimp for editing tiles, and Tiled for a map editor.

  5. #5
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    Re: TileStudio for Lazarus

    Hows the big Tile Studio effort coming along?
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  6. #6
    Hi Will. Sorry for the stand by, but I needed it.

    I was playing with the code before my summer break. I can compile it and it runs before it tries to do something, then it freezes. i think the best option is to start it again from the beginning. I know, there are other map editors, but Tile Studio has some ideas I think makes it great.

    BTW, I don't know when to start. I'm currently busy preparing the next release for Allegro.pas and have some things to do. If nobody else started it then I'll do it.
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  7. #7
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    No problem. I think a remake of a Tile Studio editor/loader is pretty neat. Mike Weiring did a great job with the original, but it lacked some documentation that might have helped, specifically in the loading, to myrecolection. I would just stress that ease of use would have to be the same when it comes to the interface or people will become discouraged from using it. Also what I felt missing was different default tiles in various sizes. 16x16, 32 x 32 and possibly 64 x 64 would be helpful for people to get to know the tool and experiment a bit. I can't quite recall if Tile Studio comes with default tiles.
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  8. #8
    It would be interesting to try Lazarus Converter for Delphi applications. I see from svn log messages in Lazarus trunk that there has been lot of work on it recently.
    blog: http://alexionne.blogspot.com/

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
    No problem. I think a remake of a Tile Studio editor/loader is pretty neat. Mike Weiring did a great job with the original, but it lacked some documentation that might have helped, specifically in the loading, to myrecolection. I would just stress that ease of use would have to be the same when it comes to the interface or people will become discouraged from using it. Also what I felt missing was different default tiles in various sizes. 16x16, 32 x 32 and possibly 64 x 64 would be helpful for people to get to know the tool and experiment a bit. I can't quite recall if Tile Studio comes with default tiles.
    I can't remember it. I'm sure it has definition files to save projects in different formats.

    Quote Originally Posted by alexione View Post
    It would be interesting to try Lazarus Converter for Delphi applications. I see from svn log messages in Lazarus trunk that there has been lot of work on it recently.
    Actually I did used Lazarus Converter. It does the conversion missing few things to fix by hand. The result compiles but just doesn't run. I shows the main window but if you click anywhere the program freezes. As I've said I've played with the source code but it was so complex (main form has hundreds of controls), has few comments, most object names are the default ones (i.e: "MenuItem10", etc.), it's hard to follow by myself.
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  10. #10

    Question Questions about GUI

    So here I am. I've decided to focus in a new TileStudio. I've started from zero because I'll do somethings different so I'll call it "TileStudio plus".

    But I was working on the "tileset editor" part and I've realized that I would change the GUI. Instead of use a single form for everithing I might use a multi-window way, similar than Lazarus and Delphi. The idea is a "project window" (a project will group tilesets, maps and other stuff as DTS files in a single unit), a "tileset editor" window, a "tilemap editor" window and a "DTS description editor" (actually a simple text editor). This way you can see more than one tilemap at a glance, compare tilesets, etc.

    What do you think?
    Last edited by Ñuño Martínez; 21-10-2010 at 09:10 AM.
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