Warming Up - Developing Games With Ruby - page 26

Using Tiled To Create Maps
While low level approach to drawing tiles in screen may be appropriate in some scenarios,
like randomly generated maps, we will explore another alternatives. One of them is this
great, open source, cross platform, generic tile map editor called Tiled .

It has some limitations, for instance, all tiles in tileset have to be of same proportions. On
the upside, it would be easy to load Tiled tilesets with Gosu::Image#load_tiles .

Tiled

Tiled uses it's own custom, XML based tmx format for saving maps. It also allows
exporting maps to JSON, which is way more convenient, since parsing XML in Ruby is
usually done with Nokogiri , which is heavier and it's native extensions usually cause more
trouble than ones JSON parser uses. So, let's see how that JSON looks like:
02-warmup/tiled_map.json

1 { "height" :10 ,
2 "layers" : [
3 {
4 "data" : [ 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 ,
0 , 0 , 65 , 6 \
5 5 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 0 , 0 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 0 ,
0 , 0 , 65 , 65 \
6 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 0 , 0 , 0 ,
0 , 65 , 65 , 65 \
7 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 ,
65 , 65 , 65 , 65 \
8 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 , 65 ,
65 , 65 , 65 , 65 \
9 ],
10 "height" :10 ,

"name" : "Water" ,

11

"opacity" :1 , 12

"type" : "tilelayer" ,

13

"visible" : true , 14

"width" :10 , 15

"x" :0 ,

16

"y" :0 17