Tiled - Mobile?
Friday, May 30, 2014 - 00:40
I'm curious if anyone has tried building Tiled for a mobile target. I'd really like to use Tiled on my android tablet if possible. It would significantly improve my workflow for creating maps and such if I could have it on a touch device.
Has anyone tried to put Tiled on a mobile platform?
I've spoken with a couple people about Tiled and I've read on the donate page that a mobile version is possible but still not fully worked out. I would like to start a donation to help the Tiled team develop (primarily Bjorn) develop Tiled far enough to release a mobile version. If enough people donate and we reach US $500 I will contribute $500 of my own money to push it over US $1,000. Who would like to collaborate on this?
I've been discussing a mobile version of Tiled with Bjorn and he's open to the idea. It will take some work and be a little bit before he can finish it but he's willing. I'm interested to hear from anyone willing to contribute even a small amount to make a mobile version of Tiled.
By "mobile version", do you mean iOS or Android?
HTML5 Canvas Old School RPG
My wife has a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) that runs Android 4.4. I want to use Tiled on that. If it works on a Kindle that would make me happy too.
To be able to try tilemaps and maps ideas would be fun and very useful.
I'm telling you, I could do some awesome things with Tiled on a tablet with the right UI setup. Touch screens make for amazing prototyping tools.
Hey cdoty, your comment didn't show up until just now for some reason. I looked at the iTileMaps app and it looks to have some fundamental problems. It seems as though it's still a bit young and needs more of the bugs worked out of it.
Edit: I'm an idiot, read the whole thing wrong. Ignore me.
No worries Nasawa, you're not an idiot.
In response to what you said originally: I considered recreating some of the features in Tiled myself but it's not a small undertaking. Tiled was started in 2004 and it's seen a lot of development. It has over 100k lines of C++ written and debugged, that's a massive amount of well-manicured code.
It has a lot of functionality that would take a while to recreate too. Even though I'm able to recreate that work for a mobile platform it would take an extraordinary effort on my part to write and debug that much code. I just don't have the time. Other people have made similar tools like this online tile map editor:
http://elias-schuett.de/git/Online-Tile-Map-Editor/
But it doesn't have some of the most basic features I've come to rely on (seriously needs an undo command!). It might seem simple but it's deceiving; since it was created, Tiled has become somewhat of the de-facto standard for tile map editor software. The TMX format can be read by an insane number of game frameworks. Every time I research a game framework I never fail to find a plugin or module of some kind already created that supports Tiled maps.
Tiled is well designed and well supported. It makes sense to ask the creator of that program to make a mobile version. He knows better than anyone how to get it right and how to make it work with the desktop versions.
I swear I'm going crazy, I keep trying to reference lines of code and I keep bouncing between Tiled and Tiled (Qt) data. Here are links to the old project in Java and the new project in C++:
http://www.ohloh.net/p/tiled
http://www.ohloh.net/p/tiled-qt
Good news for Tiled - Stefan Beller, #2 code contributor to the Tiled (Qt) program, has agreed to donate US $250 as a general donation to improve Tiled.
I'm counting all donations inspired by this post toward my US $500 goal and consider the goal to be met if Tiled gets another US $250. There is no time limit and it doesn't have to be for anything specific; you can donate to Tiled just for the sake of donating. Please let me know you're donating and it was inspired by this post and I'll count it toward my goal.
Once the US $500 goal is reached I'll make a bank transfer to Thorbjorn for the other US $500 to encourage him to make an Android tablet edition of Tiled! Thank you Stefan Beller!
The forums seem to be eating (or at least regurgitating with some delay) emails. I'm in for $10.
I tested Tiled out on my Asus Transformer Book - for touchscreen, the GUI buttons could be larger, and the menu may need some thought especially on Android. Using something like a spinner would be better for things like entering tile/map sizes. But it all seems feasible.
For editing, a touchscreen works really well to quickly paint maps. If I plug in my keyboard dock, I have something that works well with both the UI and to use the touchscreen for painting. It would be good to have some way of scrolling using my touchscreen without using the scrollbars - maybe a two-finger pan gesture? Multitouch zoom would be nice too (especially since it's already supported on a touchpad).
Tiled uses Qt which now supports Android, so porting the code shouldn't be a huge problem. Support for multitouch for dragging and zooming should be easy with Qt too, and would be a useful thing to add for the existing platforms also.
Hello William.Thompsonj
Would be awesome if there was and Android port, I could then easily make prototype map layouts on my lunch break.
How does one go about donating? Can I Paypal a few coins?
Sincerely,
Paul.
Hi Paul, happy to see you're interested in mobile Tiled too. There is a PayPal link on the Tiled website under donate. I have a German bank account though so I'm going to make a direct transfer to avoid the fees. Send me a private message if you want to chat further.
I spoke with Bjorn further and he's going to update his donate page with the options he has available for accepting donations. If you donate to Tiled for any reason and it was inspired by this thread in any way please let me know so I can track my progress in meeting my goal for donations.
www.mapeditor.org/donate.html
I donated €10 (roughly $13.97).
cdoty, sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Bravo for donating the first real bit of cash, that's a great start in the right direction!
Seems I'm rumbling a donation drum but it's for a perfectly good program and cause. The goal is another US $240 and Thorbjorn gets US $500 from me. Any more people willing to help with Tiled?
The donation page on mapeditor.org is being updated but if you want to donate using bitcoin or gittip you can find bjorn's information here:
Maybe it's premature but I passed along my donation. I know Paul has been trying to donate but ran into some trouble. Thorbjorn is working on updating the donate page with more options and is trying to get a patrion account setup/finished. Once all the methods for donation are sorted out he'll let us know. For anyone else who tried to donate and had trouble, please give the donate page a few days to be updated with new information, bjorn has been pretty busy the past few weeks.
Hey everybody,
First of all a big thanks to William for starting this fundraiser! I'd love to do a proper touchscreen-suitable version of Tiled but so far I was mainly just dreaming about this. With your support I can make this feature a priority and I now plan to work on this in the coming months and will keep you updated on the progress.
So far I have received the 10 euro from cdoty and 370 from WIlliam. That's a great start and there seem to be more people interested in donating, so this shows a good amount of interest in a mobile/tablet version of Tiled!
I want to apologize for my silence here and still not having the site updated. I'm really busy right now because I will be moving with my family to a new apartment by the end of June (it's next week), and until then there is still a lot of renovation work to be done as well as packing and then the actual move. When this is over I expect to have more time again of course, but it's still not much with a full time job and family as well.
While this fundraiser helps kickstart a new version of Tiled that is suitable for mobile/tablet, in the long term I'm looking for ways to free up more time for Tiled development. To that end I plan to set up a Patreon page as was done for OGA with the aim of raising enough money each month to allow me to work one full day a week on Tiled (or maybe one full week a month). I hope with enough visiblity this approach could succeed.
Btw, I don't really believe in relying on Qt's cross-platform capabilities to port the current UI over to a phone/tablet. While this would work fine on laptops with touchscreen, I personally would do a new UI from scratch based on Qt Quick that is focused entirely on being as usable as possible on a mobile phone or tablet.
Just to clarify my earlier comment, yep, I agree the UI needs to be updated (including for touchscreen laptops, I found some things fiddly on my Transformer Book) but I meant that the availability of the Qt API for Android means this is an option, albeit still a rather large task, but at least the entire codebase doesn't need to be rewritten in Java (or fiddling with writing your own front ends to native code) :)
I'm still using the classic Qt widgets myself and keep meaning to switch to Qt Quick, my understanding is Qt Quick is the preferred way of doing GUIs now in Qt, whether tablet or not.
Hello William.Thompsonj
I apologizes for the delayed response.
After a fair bit of googling, I finally found a way to donate! Instead of sending Eruos, I sent USD instead, and the payment then went through. :)
Was not sure if it would work, and as such I donated $10, hope it helps, will see about donating some more next month.
Sincerely,
Paul.
Paul, you are good for helping. Any amount of help is still help, and it's still appreciated by all. I think bjorn is still moving but when he's able to work on tiled I'm sure he will appreciate the help more than anyone.
Paul and other Europeans,
bjorn is european as well, so maybe you could ask him for his banking number, so a direct money transfer without paypal losses would be possible.
Not sure if he wants to give his banking number to anyone though.
I gave my donation with a bank transfer. He is probably willing to accept that form of payment if you have an account in Europe, just ask. He knows his IBAN and his konto+blz if you can use either of those.
By the way Stefan, I think Paul lives in Japan, not Europe :)