Tile Map Connected Textures

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

What’s the best way way to achieve smooth texture transitions between tiles in a tile mapped game, and not have the hard edge tiles normally produce.

I saw notch in minicraft had used his coloring technique to join the tiles together, but im using tiles that are statically coloured in the image editor

#2

Hmm… I am not sure what you mean.

#3

How can i get these smooth edges on tiles:

Instead of these hard edges?

#4

there are of course many different ways to approach this.

I will post the number of extra art in brackets at the end of each option in the case of 4 different tile types.

  • hand craft edges between different tiles for every possible combination and direction(24)
  • create a natural order for tile types (rock > grass > water) and hand craft edges for every tile typ and direction.
    Then when to tiles of a diferent type meet, choos the edge tile from the type which is higher in the hirachie(16)
  • use blending with an alpha map which is modulated linearly(4)
  • just blend linearly between two tiles on their edge(0)

In your case were you have little tiles with pixel art, I would choose option two. The extra work only scales linearly and pixelart with blending doesn’t look that good.

#5

Basically what has been done there is he’s drawn all the different tiles by hand and then chosen to draw the appropriate tile based where that tile is and what the tiles surroundings are.

#6

People also get round this with lots of layers of tilemaps… So a bottom layer for terrain, a middle layer for features (terrain dividers), and a top layer for items (trees and the like). The different layers can have different grid sizes if you want, so terrain can blend more easily.

Investigate how to use transparency (or the opposite opacity) in your graphics programs and use image types which handle transparency, like png. If you do it right you can have your trees on any terrain background (rock/desert/grass).