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Tilemancer

Procedural pixel-art tile creator · By Led

Suggestions Sticky Locked

A topic by Led created Mar 25, 2016 Views: 2,580 Replies: 21
This topic was locked by Led Apr 03, 2019

Development on Tilemancer has stopped. Read more about why and discover its spiritual successor here:

https://itch.io/t/432485/the-end-of-a-journey-the-start-of-another

Thank you all for the support!

Viewing posts 1 to 19
Developer

As you probably know, Tilemancer is still in version 0.1.0, meaning there's a lot of room for improvement, so feel free to suggest features, new nodes/presets, or bug fixes here.

I personally find the controll scheme a bit odd...
Dragging with middle click of left click seems way more intuitve than shift clicking, since you could get rid of the need to keep one hand on the keyboard, which you barely need anyways...

At first I tried to drag the sliders left and right, instead of up and down, which is possibly due to my unity background.

A preview window, which shows your texture in a tiled grid would be really helpful in order to see how your texture looks in the final result.

Another cool feature would be the ability to draw on one of the tiles or to add your own image files to edit...

It would also be efficient to be able to replace connections directly, rather than having to remove one and stick the other one on...

Apart from that it's a really good tool... Keep up the good work

Too raw. Not enough nodes. Here are nodes which are missing:

  • Sharpen
  • Direct texture input
  • Apply glsl shader
  • Tile result (any of algorithms to tile resulting picture across, with seam fixing)
  • Masked blending (also show which blending mode does what)
  • Heightmap topology detection (all of them - height lines, edge detection, normal detection)

Multiple palette types are missing. using png as palettes is only one of the many -

  • microsoft PAL format
  • ACT format
  • Hopefully photoshop swatches format (ACO) should be there.

Additional :

  • Save/load icons on palette and in file dialog are garbage an not representative of what they suppose to mean - i strongly recommend to replace them with disk and folder icons you have
  • For each value which can be adjusted via sliding add vertical ^V (up triangle/down triangle) icon to signify user that (s)he should drag it up or down for desired effect
That is all for now. I might add some more suggestions in the future once these will be considered and hopefully implemented.

a tiled preview would be very welcome,. could be on the bottom of the right panel perhaps.

agree w/ navot right click to move the camera would be nice,. (zoom on the mouse wheel would be cool too.)

perhaps you could do a combo left/right +up/down for the drag control? should work for both styles.

I figured out how to save images (just click on them),. but I agree the icon is confusing, use same one as save on main page.

Also, what formats are supported? I added .png to the file name and this works,. thanks again.

Developer

Currently only .png files are supported, regardless of the extension you input in the file browser. I plan to support more image files in the future.

I found a bug...

When you for example subtract a white texture from another you create values below zero, which just render as black like they should. But when you pass on this seamingly black texture, the negative values get passed on. If you then pass it in for example lighting, the original heightmap is still rendered. (Basically you need to clamp values before passing them on)

Another suggestion I have is when you have for example blend modes, you should describe what a mode does.

I fixed it by simply putting the list of Modes in the description...

Developer

During development, i thought i should try clamping texture's values, but upon testing this out, it revealed to be a problem. If values couldn't be "darker" than black (0.0) or "brighter" than white (1.0), there would be minimum and maxium values for a heightmap, which is not ideal.

About the blend modes, i completely forgot to add them in the "Blend" node's description! I will add them in the next update, but for now, they are respectively:

0 - Add
1 - Subtract
2 - Multiply
3 - Divide
4 - Min
5 - Max

Developer

I won't be posting too much in this topic, but rest assured that i'm reading and considering all your suggestions for future versions.

Thanks, and keep 'em coming!

Linux version please

It would also be nice to have a filextension that automatically opens with tilemancer...

Right now, when you open a saved file with tilemancer, it just shows black and the color picker, which by the way could be a bit bigger...

Another thing that is a bit annoying is the colorizer... if you have to add a color afterwards, you mess up all colours. It would be nice if the colors were mapped to a color in the pallette, and not just to a position on the color picker...

(1 edit)

Hi, I made this for Game Maker Studio

https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/3097/tmc-...

It's basically a shader that takes diffuse, normal, specular (optional) and occlusion (optional) textures....

I'm trying to see how I can use your tool to generate the normals, specular and occlusion... but after playing with it I can't really figure it out. I don't think your program does output those.

The shader is basically doing live what your tool generates as a final output... but using a different set of source image as data

I would suggest if you had the ability to generate and save those image types your tool would be that much more better...

I would like to see the following modules added:

-Heightmap to normals module, Works like your current Lighting module... taking a heightmap texture and generate a lighting normal with the option to flip the r,g,b channels as options so to match the engine the lighting normal image is for.

-Specular generator module, currently I can use any module that generates a grayscale. but it would be cool to have a module that tries to determine this from a source image.

-occlusion generator module, same comment as above

-Lighting blend module, works like your current blend + lighting modules combined, taking all those 4 textures with properly named inputs so see the final result, maybe with the option to move a directional light around in the module (ei the direction property of your lighting module), and again the ability to define the rgb channel flip to mirror the engine the source textures would be used one. If the specular or occlusion channels are omitted a default image would be used for those channels, basically ignoring the missing paramiters

This way I can save every required textures and use them in a conventional lighting system. the core features, you current modules you have would are compatible with there new modules.

Other modules:

-A boost module. takes a texture as input, outputs a texture. 4 sliders to boost the r,g,b,a channels

-A color mix module, takes 2 colors and a texture to mix the color from black to white to be col1 to col2

-A color module, to output a color that you can plug into an input channel

-A mask module, taking 2 images as source where one image is the content and the other the mask which defines the exclusion for the content image to pass through.

Your colorizer does not seem to work

a Zoom in-out and move canvas would be good

You shape module could be called fill pattern. and have the other patterns, like gradient left, right, up down and so on. it could also allow a texture as input and merge the blend with the input texture... and possible have 2 colors as input

I can see where the inspiration comes from in the design and I suspect you will add more modules to match those other similar systems, so me listing a slew of module suggestions is pointless.

Nice tool! Great potential!

First of all, brilliant tool. Even in the early stage it looks clean and provided great output. Some suggestions on what to add:

  1. An offline guide, preferably included with the tool: It took me a while to find the tutorial on how to use it, and I was confused with what to do. I assumed there was a PDF or textfile with basic instructions but there weren't any. Not even the tool itself provided much in the help button.
  2. Ability to navigate around the board: Some of the presents go slightly offscreen, so it doesn't help that there isn't a way for me to drag the entire node board to that area. Maybe click-n-drag on the grid so you can move the whole grid around?
  3. Clearer Export Options: I personally don't like clicking the texture itself to export it, especially since placing your mouse over it doesn't show a message in the top-left to say "Export Texture" (although not everything you mouse-over has a message so I can assume that it's gonna be added later?). What I'd prefer is a button in the same place as saving and loading a file to export a texture, with a menu that provides options like which texture, what file format ect...
  4. AutoTiling Export? Just to suggest an actual feature, maybe allow some basic autotiling export functionality.

Those are some of my suggestions, apologies if any of these have already been mentioned.

(1 edit)

2. Shift + Drag :)

(1 edit)

Three more suggestions:

  • The saving screen really needs a cursor
  • It would be nice to be able to duplicate nodes, without having to fiddle with the sliders all over again
  • In Unity, when you are dragging a slider and reach the edge of the screen, your cursor jumps to the other side and you can continue dragging, without having to click on the bar agin. This would be really useful when making big changes to a slider
(1 edit)

I don't know if this would be a bug or not, but if you have a node with a space in the name, it lets you use it, despite that it crashes if you try to load a save with that node. It seems like either it shouldn't crash or it shouldn't let you use the node. (like how it doesn't show in the list or shows the default node if the node has a bug in it)

It also seems like the Lighting node changes contrast based on tile size.

AWESOME program!!!

Some quick feedback:

  • Palette:
    • re-ordering the colors, especially if it defines the colorizer's picker later on
  • Colorizer:
    • the colorizer is definitely clunky to use, especially how it feeds from the palette, the absence of location value sliders, and the amount of clicks to a full color ramp
    • i ended up colorizing in Photoshop w/ a gradient map...
  • UI:
    • ability to preview the tile?
    • ability to move the canvas using the OS's "pan" (trackpad on laptops, for ex.) instead of needing additional key press.
    • ability to set resolution: can only fit 3 nodes side-by-side on my 15" Retina screen? I like the pixel aesthetic, but don't need them to be 4x...
    • ability to set values w/ keyboard instead of just sliders.
(3 edits)

Evaluation? Zooming and panning would be good also.

I'd like to see a Save as Preset option, to save the actual canvas as... well... a preset ;)

Additionally an identificative icon for custom and "native" nodes would be more than welcome

I guess, "layers" in Perlin Noise should be named "levels".

Man, I'm noticing SO many awesome improvements...! LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!

A "levels" node would be sweet, so that the output of "lighting" could be made to span the whole black-to-white spectrum, leading to less cramped use of "colorizer".

Or instead of "levels", just a simple input/ouptut to strech the image's min/max to black/white?

Sorry for Necroposting, but I Wish for More Types of Generators.

Firstly: Ground based Ones, such as Grass, Dirt and Gravel.

Secondly: some Other Patterns, Such as Bricks that aren't Random and can be used to create Stacked bond Bricks, Herringbone and its Diagonal Variant; Metal Patterns Like Diamond Plate, Hexagon and Grates that are Rectangular or Round.

Finally: Scratches, they can be Random or Directional. and can be Sized up and Down to Make Tears.

Developer

Hello.

Development on Tilemancer has stopped indefinitely. You find out more here, and keep an eye out for Tilemancer's successor.

Thank you for the suggestion :)

Developer locked this topic