Library for arbitrary-shaped tiles?

Engines, Libraries and Tools
#1

Hi JGO!

I’ve been lurking for ages and have always been really impressed by the stuff you guys/girls produce… Now I’ve got some time to have a go at writing some games myself so decided it was time to join :slight_smile:

I’m interested in tile based (maybe I should say grid-based) strategy games but never really know what kind of board ideas would work best on, e.g. square, hex, random shapes like real-world countries. At the moment my hot game idea might be great on triangular tiles but who knows!

So my question is this: are there any libraries out there that might help with that kind of thing? Stock open-source implementations of some different-shaped tile grids? Or even better would be something that handled arbitrary-shaped tiles in a modular kind of way.

I’ve done some googling, and searching on here, but I’m not really sure what to look for. What I can see is that there’s going to be much better support for producing square-shaped assets with utilities like Tiled, but beyond that I’ve drawn a blank. Any ideas would be great.

I’m kind of attracted to building something anyway - doing the engine is half the fun right?! - but I guess it never hurts to get a headstart if you can.

Cheers :slight_smile:

#2

Side topic - If you are just practicing then it’s ok not to be sure of what you are trying to do. If you already got a hang of it and ready to build a game, please design first. You should know what you are going to make. Otherwise you WILL waste way more time than you can imagine right now.

Without knowing what you have in mind, I do now see why you need anything. Just pick a library that takes care of low level stuff like libGDX. You can create your grids on world space. But what your grids represent? What they are supposed to do? What interacts with them? How long they stay in the grid?

#3

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html

There are several sections here that deal with various shapes of tiles (among other interesting things). Square tiles are obviously easier if you haven’t done much game programming before because they fit naturally into 2d arrays without any complicating factors that other setups have. Other shapes of map spaces can look great and change the way the game plays, but you’re going to spend a significant amount of time implementing them before you get into any actual game code.

#4

[quote=“imagnity,post:2,topic:49731”]
It’s OK, I have loads of designs! My trouble’s always been finding time to make any of them due to having to waste all my coding energy at work (retired now - woo! :D)

Thanks - Amit’s pages are a really great resource.

I agree it’s always refreshing when a game has more interesting map topology - all the square-tiled games these days can start to look a bit samey. Sounds like I’ll have to roll something myself though - no big deal, I kind of wanted to anyway :smiley:

#5

Good luck and have fun… :slight_smile: