87 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
87 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
%% title = "tairu - an interactive exploration of 2D autotiling techniques"
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scripts = ["tairu/tairu.js"]
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+ I remember since my early days doing programming, I've been interested in how games like Terraria handle automatically tiling their terrain.
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- in Terraria, you can fully modify the terrain however you want, and the tiles will connect to each other seamlessly.
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- TODO: short videos demoing this here
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- once upon a time I heard of a technique called *bitwise autotiling*
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+ this technique involves assigning the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) to a bitset.
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then for each tile you look at which adjacent tiles should be connected to
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- this connection condition can be whatever you want - in most cases it's just "is the adjacent tile of the same type as the current tile?"
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- for example, "is the tile to the left a dirt tile?"
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- and then you use this bitset to index into a lookup table of tiles
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- for example, say we have the following grid of tiles:\
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TODO editable grid on javascript
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for each tile, we can assign a bitset of cardinal directions like so:\
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TODO grid linked with the other grid to show which adjacent tiles each tile connects to
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- in JavaScript it would look something like this:
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```javascript
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// TODO code example
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```
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- bitwise autotiling is a really cool technique that I've used in plenty of games in the past
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- my (very messy) LÖVE-based game engine `lovejam`, powering my game jam games from 2018, had an autotiling feature in its level editor based on this
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- TODO video of Planet Overgamma editor doing the magic after issuing the `at` command (or whatever it was called, i forgor :skull:)
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- every iteration of Planet Overgamma since then has been using this exact technique for procedurally generated, editable terrain
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+ but one day I found a really cool project called Tilekit (TODO link)
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+ (of course it's really cool, after all rxi made it)
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- for context rxi is the genius behind the Lua-powered, simple, and modular text editor `lite` that I was using for quite a while
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- after a while I switched to a fork - Lite XL, which had better font rendering and more features
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- I stopped using it because VS Code was just more feature packed and usable; no need to reinvent the wheel, rust-analyzer *just works.*
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- the LSP plugin for Lite XL had some issues around autocompletions not filling in properly :pensive:\
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it's likely a lot better now, but back then I decided this is too much for my nerves.
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while tinkering with your editor is something really cool, in my experience it's only cool up to a point.
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- the cool thing with Tilekit is that it's *more* than just your average bitwise autotiling - of course it *can* do basic autotiling, but it can also do so much more
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- if I had to describe it, it's basically something of a *shader langauge for tilesets.* this makes it really powerful, as you can do little programs like
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- autotile using this base tileset
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- if the tile above is empty AND with a 50% chance
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- then grass
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- if the tile above is solid AND with a 10% chance
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- then vines
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- if the tile above is vines AND with a 50% chance
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- then vines
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- I mean, after all - bitwise autotiling is basically a clever solution to an `if` complexity problem, so why not extend that with more logic and rules and stuff to let you build more complex maps
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- ever since then I've been wanting to build something just like Tilekit, but in the form of an educational, interactive blog post to demonstrate the ideas in a fun way
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- and what you're reading is the result of that.
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+ so let's get going! first, we'll build a basic tile editor using JavaScript.
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<script type="module" src="{{ config.site }}/static/js/tairu/tairu.js"></script>
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+ not my favorite language, but we're on the Web so it's not like we have much more of a choice.
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- I could use TypeScript, but this page follows a philosophy of not introducing complexity where I can deal without it.
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TypeScript is totally cool, but not necessary.
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- I'll be using Web Components (in particular, custom elements) combined with canvas to add stuff onto the page.
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