Slick Forums

Hello everyone!

Just thought I'd post this on the forums in case people are looking for an alternative to Tiled. I've been developing it for ~2 months now for one of my own projects so I don't know if people will find it useful or not Any feedback is greatly appreciated

About Chestnut
Chestnut is a tile map editor. It’s designed to accommodate both the single developer and large development teams by unifying maps as one project.

Features:
- Unified map settings and tileset referencing
- Simplified open standard XML-based file format
- Multiple drawing brushes
- View surrounding maps in editor, ensuring maps connect properly
- Java & C# APIs
- Collision Editor – visually draw collisions on your maps
- Property Editor – visually insert properties to your maps, allowing for simplified NPC, event and script addition
- World Exporter – export a scaled down image of your game world

Why Chestnut?
While Tiled is a great tool, in developing certain projects I found it to be slightly inefficient in the some areas:
- Dynamic map loading of maps at runtime often resulted in minor lag due to required decompression
- Loading over 250 maps at once (e.g. on a game server) would result with insane amounts of RAM being used up
- Mapping teams often messed up when linking maps together since they could not visually see the maps beside each other

Some features of Chestnut also came from these problems I've encountered:
- Content teams were slowed down by not being able to visually insert scripted events to map coordinates
- Inexperienced mapping teams often deviated from map dimension or layering standards, Chestnut enforces project-wide standards

Official Page
http://bitsoc.com/?page_id=5

APIs
http://bitsoc.com/?p=91

nice idea

do you have tutorials, documentations or examples?

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Blog | Last game Drone Swarm

I have API documentation here:
http://bitsoc.com/api/chestnut-java/

Documentation on the map format here:
http://bitsoc.com/?p=54

I'll write up some tutorials in the morning since Ireland has shut down due to 2 inches of snow

Just one question from me as the developer of Tiled. Why write another editor from scratch instead of adding these features to Tiled? I've wanted to add these kind of features to Tiled for a long time, but there are a lot of things to do and my time is limited.

Also, this editor is proprietary and Windows only?

I'm not a big fan of C++ or Qt and it seemed like a big rewrite since Tiled is orientated around single maps instead of a unified project. Seemed quicker to get what I needed by doing my own tool.

It's Windows only because I developed it through C# and the Windows Presentation Foundation. I'll open source it if people want, I just don't see the point for such a small tool (~2322 lines of code).

One reason to not use it ...

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TWL - The Themable Widget Library

MathiasM the reason is that it's only for windows? Really not that good reason not to use it.

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Not having windows is very good reason not to use windows only software. But then again.. author knows this from the start, so no new stuff going on there...

"But then again.. author knows this from the start, so no new stuff going on there..."

What do you mean by that? O_o

just what I said, chestnut is for usage on windows, you planned that, no surprises there

There's no reason to poop on the editor, it looks pretty nifty. I'm a fan of Tiled Map Editor myself, so I won't be switching any time soon.

I didn't know it was Windows only, being a Linux user, but I won't hold it against you



I'll go out on a limb here and say it's a pretty good reason not to use the editor if you're not a Windows user.

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Linux and free software enthusiast.

No worries a programmer has volunteered to port it to Linux I've open sourced the editor now since people seem to be bothered by closed-source-ism

More info here -> http://bitsoc.com/?p=148

kdenewton i've been using linux for the past 10 years, but i still sometimes use virtual box to boot windows.

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I'm curious as to why you needed C# at all. I've been working on a tiled map editor for a while now and I've never used anything but Java.

So why did you use C# at all? What purpose does it serve?

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Breakout is a stupid game - XKCD

did the site go down permanently? or just temporarily?
site being bitsoc.com

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“The people of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”