Map Editor Design - Tile Choice Awareness?

programming
1

Hi!

This is my first post here and I’m kinda stuck reworking my Map Editor to make it easier to users to create maps for RPG-like games.

I’m not much of a programmer so forgive me if the terminologies I use are wrong. ^_^;

The first thing I want to achieve is for the Editor to recognise which tile from a tileset to place on a map. Here’s an example:


link:map editor example


map editor location test concept

I’ve already placed all my tiles in a a fixed order in one MC.
eg.:
Frame
1 Horizontal Path
2 Vertical Path
3 Upper Left Turn
4 Upper Right Turn
5 Lower Left Turn
6…etc…

While placing my Road, I want it to know when to place a turn on it’s own, when to place a cross junction, or T-Junction, etc…

This is way, users are only exposed to 1 tile to choose from instead of hundreds of tiles.

I’ve achieved up to this point using a series of functions and nested Ifs. It’s horribly messy so far.

I’m kinda stuck with this problem though…when several roads or water paths are next to each other, they should combine to become a plain or lake.

Sample Code of how messy it is…

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//Test for TURN UPPER RIGHT
//xp1,yp1,xdp1,xn1 are the locations of surrounding tiles. These test to see if there are similar tiles active or inactive around it.

if (xp1 == true && yp1 == true && xdp1 == false && xn1 == false && ydp1 == false && xp1yn1 == false && yn1 == false) {

//number + path is the tile and tilesets to use

        _root["cell"+x+"_"+y].mytile = 6+path;  
        _root["cell"+x+"_"+y].gotoAndStop(6+path);

// checkpathtype function simply assigns values to the tile, to keep track of it’s tileset type

        checkpathtype(x, y);
        _root["cell"+(x+1)+"_"+(y)].mytile = 3+path;
        _root["cell"+(x+1)+"_"+(y)].gotoAndStop(3+path);
        checkpathtype(x+1, y);
        _root["cell"+(x)+"_"+(y+1)].mytile = 4+path;
        _root["cell"+(x)+"_"+(y+1)].gotoAndStop(4+path);
        checkpathtype(x, y+1);

} else if (xn1 == true && ydp1 == true && yn1 == false && yp1 == false && xdn1 == false && xn2 == false) {
root[“cell”+(x-1)+""+y].mytile = 6+path;
root[“cell”+(x-1)+""+y].gotoAndStop(6+path);
checkpathtype(x-1, y);
} else if (yn1 == true && xp1yn1 == true && xdn1 == false && xn1 == false && xp1 == false && yn2 == false) {
root[“cell”+x+""+(y-1)].mytile = 6+path;
root[“cell”+x+""+(y-1)].gotoAndStop(6+path);
checkpathtype(x, y-1);
}
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Somehow, I feel that I’m not doing this in a very efficient manner. Has anyone done anything similar before? Are there any algorithms that anyone could share to help make this simpler?

Not really looking for code, but better concepts to improve this and make this whole mess simpler to manage.

Any advice would be most appreciated!

Thanks!
~Firehawk DC