Tileset development: What's it like right now?

Game Talk The Lab
1

Hi-Hello! I’m Tsu, months ago I was involved in making tilesets for this game but eventually lost all the energy to continue the work due to how tiles were implemented at the time.

To describe that a little: All tiles were declared in a Json and there was no real way to say “this is a [book].” and have that immediately just pick up the [book] tile. Instead they all had their own ID and you had to change the displayed tile manually.
The problem with this was that I wanted to make a rather simple tileset with shape recognition rather than detailing every individual item in the game. - And it was a further problem because the experimental release state usually had new contributors every week who added more objects, and thus more ID’s that I had to update largely through manually searching for them.

So I’m curious what it is like for the people who are currently maintaining a tileset, I heard the developer I was occasionally in touch with at the time has stopped working on it; so are there any changes made to how the development of tiles for CDDA works now?

2

I’m probably not the best person to answer this stuff, but I think HRose did something like that here. It looks like there’s some category fallback stuff in experimental too, but I don’t know much about that.

There are also a couple of tileset editors here in The Lab of course, but I haven’t really used those very much (for RetroDays).

3

Thanks for that Anti, gave me something to go on. After durdling about with it for about an hour I don’t think I will end up resuming my work on this.
That said if anyone wanted to use my tileset still, the tiles are mostly in there; It’s just a bunch of manual labour to change the id’s around and make them display flowers as flowers, floors as floors and water as water et al.

So the tileset would at least theoretically be playable as it is now. If I had updated it I would have wanted to just have representations for most things anyway; the idea was always to use shape and colour recognition in a slightly prettier format than ascii.

So yeah, sorry to the people who were asking me to restart the tileset. I’m just not up for what feels like another “job” in addition to my actual job.