Chapter 13. An Isometric Tile Game

Tiling Software

One of the time-consuming aspects of side-scroller creation is the building of the tile map. A realistic game will require a much larger collection of tiles, including ones for smoothing the transition between one type of tile and another.

Tile map editors let you visually edit tiles and build a map using drawing tools. Here are two popular, free tools:

• Tile Studio (http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/)

• Mappy for PC (http://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php)

Functionally, they're similar, but Mappy has additional support for creating hexagonal and isometric tiles. It's possible to customize how TileStudio exports its data by creating a Tile Studio Definition (TSD), which defines the output file format.

Tile Studio is used with Java (actually J2ME) in Chapter 11 of J2ME Game Programming by Martin Wells (Muska and Lipman/Premier-Trade). In the example, Tile Studio exports several tile maps to a TSD-defined file, and Java is used to read them. This chapter is available online at http://www.courseptr.com/ptr_detail.cfm?isbn=1592001181.

Mappy places a lot of emphasis on playback libraries/APIs, allowing its maps to be loaded, manipulated, and displayed. The Mappy web site offers two Java playback libraries. JavaMappy (http://www.alienfactory.co.uk/javamappy/) is an open source Java playback library for Mappy. It includes pluggable renderers for J2ME and J2SE 1.4. The download includes several examples and documentation.