TileCat is a computer based tile mapper. My inspiration for this project was a utility for Daemons but I've made it its own project.

At the moment I have a usable release which supports creating tilemaps for visual, collision, and transitional data (or whatever you specify for each)

It produces a file with a simple format ([MapWidth],[MapHeight],[data])
(Each tile is a single byte)

Eventually I want it to export the data into an AppVar or a String for use in calculator games. I even want it to send it directly to the calculator from the program.

Here's a screenshot:



You can download here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10573921/Tile%20Map%20Editor.zip

Note the README is pretty bad but I suggest reading it nonetheless.

Future updates:

-Non-Visual modes will have background visual data updated in real time
-Better README
-Ctrl+N will start a new window in Collision or Transitional modes (right now you have to run the program and set it to those modes, in the next release it will start in visual mode by default)

NOTE:
Every Collision and Transitional map MUST have an accompanying visual map of the same name or the program might crash.

Can you crop the image so only the window that has your application in it shows? It is making the post hard to read, because it expands the text outside of the width of my browser.

There you go, I resized it.

Ok, I have completely rewritten the source code to actually make it possible to add features (The old code was a mess!)

Important changes:

Files now save as ints! Meaning you have to load 4 bytes for every tile

This allows for much larger tilesets that are not limited to 255 tiles. (I may write a small C++ library to give a save and load function)

You also now have events and NPC as available maps.

This build is overall much faster I believe, as well.

Coming soon:

The ability to open new windows for other tilemaps within the program.
More optimizations as to the number of tiles drawn at one time (right now each tile is drawn each frame)
Export to calculator format (is there a program that can do this to a binary file or a text file?)

here's the link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10573921/Tile%20Map%20Editor.zip

What's the original language for this? C? C++? If either of those, there are some great serialization libraries for C/C++ that will save you a lot of hassle in designing your save file format and keeping it consistent as you modify and adapt it to your needs.

C++. What are they called? They sound very useful.

New updates

I added two important features.

A Fill function (Ctrl + F + Click)

and a Copy/Paste Function (Ctrl + C/V + Click)

The copy and fill function both require you to press the hotkey and click at the same time, then they wait for you to click someplace else to get the area to fill/copy.

The paste function is a bit glitchy so be careful. It sometimes makes the program crash and I do not know why yet.

EDIT: Made a source forge project for it

https://sourceforge.net/p/tilecat/home/Home/

Sorry, I didn't notice your post. I use the Google protobuf library in a research project at school, which is extremely powerful (and might be slightly overkill for you, depending on what you're doing). Glad to see that you've moved to SourceForge; what kind of license are you using? GPL, BSD, MIT, WTFPL, something else?

WTFPL

I don't really care what people do with the program or its source code

Protobuf seems interesting. If I rewrite TileCat again I'll probably use it.

Either way, you now know it exists if you happen to end up as an engineer or computer scientist doing some more hardcore research and need such a thing. Do you consider this more or less finished now, or are there still major components you want to add?

It's not even nearly finished. I want to eventually add in features that aren't found in other editors.
I also want to make this program usable for calc programmers needing a tilemap editor that isn't limited by screensize. But for that I need some kind of library to convert a binary file to a file readable by the calc. (Hopefully as an AppVar)

I plan on working on this and Daemons throughout College basically.

Homer-16: You could consider using my BinPac8x program for that, if you'd like. Given a name and a chunk of binary, it can wrap the proper header for a .8xp program around the chunk.

Perfect! Just what I need. I tried making my own function before but I never could figure out the header. ^^'

Thanks!