Tile Designer

The Tile Designer is the editor for the current selection in your tilesheet. On the top it shows the layers from bottom to top and below it shows the selection in the bitmap, the active tile (current layer), the combined tile (all layers), and the selection in the tilesheet.

Using the designer may require some practice. Generally, you can always use the right mouse button to select a tile or pick it up and the left mouse button to place it.

So if you are not sure, it is always safe to right-click on anything.

For the layer strip at the top, you can left-click on any block to set it to the active tile. If you click on the light blue area between two tiles, the new tile will be inserted. You can right-click on any of the tiles and the active tile will be set to that tile’s properties so that you can edit it. If you right-click between two tiles, the GroupWithNext property will enabled for the tile at the left (which is discussed later). To remove a tile, use the middle mouse button.

For the bitmap selection (bottom left), if there are multiple tiles, select any of them with the right mouse button to just select the tile as the active tile..

The active tile is where you edit the properties. For most of them, just use the Properties window at the right. There are some keyboard shortcuts, like Alt+Up and Alt+Down (or Shift+mouse scroll wheel) to select the previous or next gradient, Alt+Right and Alt+Left (or mouse scroll wheel) for lighter or darker. And you can click on the edges of the tile for quick horizontal or vertical flip. When you are finished editing your tile, place it on a layer at the top.

The combined tile just shows what the resulting tile looks like, no need to click on it.

For the tilesheet selection (bottom right), when you right-click on one of the tiles, it is loaded into the editor and it’s layers are displayed at the top. If you right-click on one of those tiles, you set the combined tile into the tilesheet at that location.

You will often want to perform the same transformations on a group of tiles (like in the image above, you don’t want to recolor all 4 tiles manually). In this case you can hold Ctrl and left-click on the selected tile in the tilesheet selection (bottom right) and it will add the remaining tiles with the same transformations.

Here is a different case where you want to change the properties in one layer (the color of one layer):


In this case you can use Shift and left-click on the selected tile and the other tiles will get the same properties.

Tile Transform Properties

Here are the properties that you can edit for tiles:

  • Alpha – sets the transparency of the layer, 0.0 = fully transparent, 1.0 = opaque
  • AlphaModeNormal, Multiply (alpha channels are multiplied), RGBAlphaMultiply (the brightness of the colors is used as alpha, black = transparent, white = opaque)
  • Contrast – 0.0 = no contrast at all, 1.0 = normal, 2.0 = double contrast, etc.
  • FlipHorizontal / FlipVertical / RotateRight – mirror the tile horizontally or vertically or rotate it clockwise
  • GradientIndex – the gradient in the palette (either absolute where 0 is the first gradient in your palette or relative where this is added to the gradient used in your tile, depending on OnePatternPerTile)
  • GroupWithNext – if true, the transformation is done on a separate channel with the next layer and the next will be with the main channel (see the example with 4 layers above, the 2nd and 3rd are used together)
  • HighCut / LowCut – if the offset in the palette is above or below this value, there will be transparency
  • Inverted – inverts the layer if true
  • Offset – the offset in the palette added to every pixel in the layer
  • OnePatternPerTile – if true, the GradientIndex is absolute, if false, relative
  • Precision – how pixel color values are rounded, 0.0 = normal, 1.0 = rounded to exact steps in the palette

The following properties are also available in the Indie and Pro versions:

  • BlendModeNormal, Add / Sub (adds and subtracts RGB values), Multiply (multiplies RGBA values), Mix (avarage color), Alpha (use alpha only), RGBAlpha (use color as alpha channel), AddOffset / SubOffset (add or subtract the offset to the position in the palette) / Min / Max (minimum and maximum)
  • Code – LUA code that can call a script to modify your pixels (see Scripting)
  • GroupPos – the position in a group (availabe to code)
  • GroupSize – the size of the group (available to code)
  • RandomSeed – random seed for code

The following properties are only available in the Pro version:

  • PaletteGradientShiftFactor / PaletteOffsetShiftFactor – use these to specify how each layer is recolored when you recolor an area in the map (default = 1, set to 0 for layers that should always keep the same color)
  • ColorTransform – this provides an easy way to transform colors, similar to ColorTransform in Flash (multiply r, g, b, a and add r, g, b, a)

Back to Learn