Tiles

Mar 2008 · age 26

What it was

A two-night C# command-line tool for generating auto-tiling terrain. An artist painted only three small alpha masks on a purple-bordered template: a corner, an edge and an inner corner. The tool rotated and composited them into a fourteen-cell set, multiplied a source texture against those masks quadrant by quadrant to produce thirty-two quarter-tiles indexed by a 3-bit neighbourhood code, then read a black-and-white map image and stamped four quarter-tiles for every filled cell, producing a finished terrain map. Diagonal neighbours counted only when both adjacent edges were filled, the rule that makes blob tiling look right. Two batch scripts chained the steps, and the last run produced a composed map of about a megabyte. An interactive painter was started twenty minutes before the tool and never got past an empty form.

Wins, for the age

At twenty-six, over two nights, Jeff generated an entire terrain set from three painted primitives, four years before Tiled's terrain brush (2012).
Covered every eight-neighbour case with thirty-two quarter-tiles instead of 47 or 256 full ones, finding on their own what RPG Maker's autotiles (2000) had composed from quarters.
Worked out the diagonal rule from first principles, one mammalian brain still at it past one in the morning.
Used the purple border itself as the metadata, so no configuration file was needed.

What it taught

Look for the symmetry that turns thirty-two things into three.
Ship the command-line pipeline before the GUI; the pipeline shipped and the GUI did not.
Per-pixel get and set calls are fine for a tool run three times a night and unusable for anything interactive.
A batch file is a perfectly good build system for an art pipeline, but two tables that must agree should be tied together by code, not by one late night's care.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Kitchen: the engine and its tile-grid world, built the same month. Kitchen Demo Game: a 20 by 20 grid of tiles that deserved better ground. Descendants: Cutter: another small pixel tool feeding an asset pipeline. Oldskool: the 2D game ambitions, picked up again. RPG Spine: tile worlds and art tooling for a 1-bit RPG.

Epitaph

Here lies Tiles, which painted three corners and let symmetry finish the map.