GameMaker Less tedious ways for creating auto-tiling templates? (No dynamic in-game autotiling in GMS2?)

[Ozmelk]

Hey. I've been using this auto tiling system for my dynamic destructible walls for a while:

It uses the following template: http://shaunspalding.co.uk/files/tiles2.png

But now I require implementing dozens of different tile sets for different environments, and doing it through this template has been very painful and tedious. Every new tile set I design in photoshop, or slightly alter, I then have to insert into this template again and again. It takes me a lot of time to just test out different designs and see how they act in-game.

As a side note I have also switched to GMS2, which now has a build in auto tiling system, but to my surprise it actually doesn't work dynamically in-game. It only works on map editor, which is quite silly. This means we must still use previous tedious methods if we want dynamic destructible walls. Or am I mistaken?

Is there any way I can make this easier? Should I find or write a better template/software that is less tedious to put together each time? Maybe I should make a template that is more spacious and has better reference points. How do you guys handle your dynamic auto tiling and creation of tile sets

 

[Ozmelk]

I was informed that runtime auto-tiling is on the development roadmap, and so is generating a 47-tile set from a basic set of 5 tiles.

That's exciting, but is there any ETA on that, or is that just general ideas they have planned, which could take them months if not years to implement?

Do they have a more in depth roadmap or incoming changes somewhere on the forums?
This https://help.yoyogames.com/hc/en-us/articles/231719448-RoadMap is large and in no particular order. It would be nice to know how soon they plan on implementing this so that I can wait for it. Otherwise if its gonna take long it might be better to create something of my own.

 

[Ozmelk]

Any thoughts?

 

[Yal]

As a side note I have also switched to GMS2, which now has a build in auto tiling system, but to my surprise it actually doesn't work dynamically in-game. It only works on map editor, which is quite silly. This means we must still use previous tedious methods if we want dynamic destructible walls. Or am I mistaken?

I second this, it'd be really handy in stuff like procedural generation to at least have a function that "rerolls" the image of all automatic tiles in a layer. If you build your tiles the right way it's not too hard to do manually, though...

tileimage = 1*tileRight + 2*tileUp + 4*tileLeft + 8*tileDown;//Assumes 16-tile autotiling

 

[Deleted member 13992]

I've been thinking about this as well. I've just started using GMS2's autotile and have started converting some of my tilesets to match the template. I agree it's a lot of work. My tiles previously looked more like bits of walls and corners that sort of made sense, rather than the scrambled puzzle arrangement of the template. I'm guessing yours as well.

Perhaps a solution would be to write a bit of software that takes the template preferred by artists and rearranges the tiles to match the template used by autotile. Could be done just by cutting and moving bits of surfaces automatically then saving the result PNG as the tileset used by autotile.

Could be standalone software, or integrated in the engine.