> But what are the real advantages of the Tilemap object?

>

It will make dungeon generator much easy, you can manage your tiling by array, etc. This will also let you to provide user-modded mapping much easier. In short, it made what you did less painful and easier to maintain.

> It looks more complicated.

>

It simplify what you did.

> My experience with tile maps and sprite sheets is that the terms are often used interchangeably in the game industry but I could always be wrong.

>

In C2, sprite sheet is the compiled tile of sprite animation, I think.

Well, I'm not at all interested in making dungeon generators or user-modded mapping.

Simple is in the eye of the beholder.

A sprite sheet is a compiled [set of] tiles [used for] sprite animation. But, Ashley has figured out a very cool hack to use this as a way to place tiles on a layer. He gives a good example of this use in his tutorial on platformers at https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/253/how-to-make-a-platform-game/page-2. This is a cool tutorial, although the Construct 2 user interface has changed slightly and the wording for importing a sprite has changed from "Importing a sprite strip" to "Import frames" followed by "From sprite strip...". And Ashley talks about tiles and tilesets and the tiles.png file.

The tilemap object sounds useful for the things you recommend, but not for the simple hand-placed layouts I'm working with. But thanks for your answers and it gives me a clue about why I might or might not want to use the tilemap object.

shinkan I thought about your post a bit more and I think you are wrong. Not about the words "sprite sheet" and "tile map" (although the fact that "tiles" are in the sprite sheet is a bit confusing), but more for your unasked-for advice.

While your advice might have been fine more than 50 years ago, the world today is changing way to fast to sit on the sidelines and study until I know enough. Everything is changing and people's terminology is likely to be a bit loose.

Yes, there is a difference between sprite objects and tilemap objects. But the files that are pulled in aren't as clearly defined. The sprite sheet I used was a set of tiles and it looks just like a tile map you might see on the Tiled web site (except that Tiler tile maps also have XML data and the proper name for those tile maps is a TMX file.

I don't think you were helpful in your criticism because you didn't say something like:

[quote:2y6iq5ag]Use the term "sprite sheet" when referring to sprites and use "tile maps" when to the tilemap object. A sprite sheet is a simple art file but a tile map is ....

A glossary would be really helpful. Maybe there is one. Maybe not. But if there is, it would have been helpful to point to it.

Everything is moving very fast and names are changing. Most of the people who are working with Construct 2 seem to be aware of this and try to be helpful if someone doesn't understand some part of something. While I love Construct 2 a lot, I feel like it's isn't completely a finished product (I'm looking at you, Android and iOS) and I don't think it will be for a while because browser adoption of HTML5 is still a bit spotty and because HTML5 is a broad collection of technologies, some of those are baked, some are half-baked, and others are still a dream (MIDI, for example).

The idea of me making one mistake and people laughing at me and not reading my blog is not appropriate in an age where things are changing very fast, and the rate of change is accellerating. People who are successful in cutting-edge technology learn to not be distressed by loose terminology and pay attention to the essentials. My blog post (so far) seems to be accurate and I think will be useful for people who are trying to adapt Construct 2 to a Firefox OS mobile-only UX.

I'm sharing my blog posts with the Construct 2 audience in hopes that I'll find out if I've made any significant mistakes and I will change my post to say "sprite sheet" instead of "tile map". But my main focus is on using HTML5 to make games for the devices that support HTML5 (which so far is Firefox OS, which Amazon recently jumping on the bandwagon, Tizen falling off, and Microsoft marching in the wrong direction). If you read my other blog posts, you'll see that they are covering HTML5 in great detail. Everything I do is tested and works.

I am reminded of a saying I heard many times when I worked for IBM (a long time ago). "There are three names for everything and every name has three meanings."

This is really great. Now I can apply all the logic I've been using in C and JavaScript!!!

I looked for this kind of info in the docs but didn't find it. I think my next blog post will cover this.

Thank you for all your help. Who'd a thunk it was "X"?

On Left button Clicked

(subEvent)

Player

Platform has wall to right

Player>Set Y to Player.Y -32

Else

Player Set X to Player.X +32

That's what I'm missing. How do I insert an "Else"?

By the way, shinkan, I looked for a Construct 2 glossary and didn't find it. Is there a glossary?

My experience with tile maps and sprite sheets is that the terms are often used interchangeably in the game industry but I could always be wrong.

The beauty of a blog is that you can revise your posts. If my terminology is wrong, I'll correct it. I can see that sprite sheet is the proper term. Unlike many others, I'm not worried a whole lot if people laugh at me. I've written more than 100 posts on Firefox OS programming and a few on using Construct 2 for making games for Firefox OS.

Laugh all you want. I hope it makes you feel good. It doesn't make me feel bad and the result will be that the mistakes will get fixed. In general it sounds like my post works.

This is an interesting question. And I'm still trying to forget old games like this. (Wizardry and early Ultima dungeons and early Might and Magic.)

Essentially you need to throw up some kind of sprites that cover the floor, ceiling, left and right walls, and the back wall, and then change it every time you move. You need arrays to determine what to display at each point. Whew!

I don't think Construct 2 is going to do this easily. But you could dig around on eBay or other places and find books on how to modify (mod) Doom and other early 3-D games that would give you the same effects.

Books like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Focus-Programming-Quake-Arena-Development/dp/193184156X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412753776&sr=1-3&keywords=game+programming+mods

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Halo-Mods-Stephen-Cawood/dp/0672328046/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412753752&sr=1-6&keywords=game+programming+mods

http://www.amazon.com/Half-Life-2-Mods-Dummies/dp/0470096314/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412753752&sr=1-7&keywords=game+programming+mods

Essentially you want to take a game engine for 3D games that someone else has created and modify the artwork and behaviors. There's a huge community of people who do this, but I don't know anything about them.

I'd like to see a good example of this also!

I may have my terminology wrong. I am inserting a tile map into a sprite and using the animation to determine which image will display. But I don't think I ever referred to a tilemap object. I'll add a note to my post, but I'm pretty vague on what the TileMap object does and why I want it.

I see that there is a tilemap object which is defined at https://www.scirra.com/manual/172/tilemap. And another entry on Tilemap Bars at https://www.scirra.com/manual/171/tilemap-bar.

For just putting down tiles, it seems like the method I used would be simple enough. But what are the real advantages of the Tilemap object? It looks more complicated.

I'm trying to wrap my head around events.

Here's an example I'm working with. If the user clicks a mouse, I want ONE of two things to happen.

1. Mouse click - If there is NO wall to the player right, I want the player to move 32 pixels right.

2. Mouse click - If there is a wall to the player right, I want the player to move 32 pixels up.

The point of doing this is to have the player climb over blocks, but only blocks one 32x32 block high.

[attachment=0:abe90mzx][/attachment:abe90mzx]

But I have that nagging feeling that I could write these events another way. Any advice?

Earlier I wrote a post on my blog about using Construct 2 to create platformers for Firefox OS. Aphrodite was kind enough to point out that it was more efficient to use tile maps than to pull in tile images one by one. So I wrote a new tutorial just on tile maps. I discovered that Construct 2 will remove white space and resize quite nicely as well. Thank you, Aphrodite!

Here's my post on Tile Maps. http://firefoxosgaming.blogspot.com/2014/10/tile-maps-in-construct-2.html.

And as always, I'm happy to know if I goofed up! I'm going to continue to write about Construct 2 for the Firefox OS audience, which is HTML5 all the way, same as Construct 2.

I just bought So You Want to Be a Game Designer!: A Balanced Book of Practice and Theory by Merijn de Boer (http://merijndeboer.com/) because it was only $5 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GV4O9LK/). I'm surprised at the amount of information in it for a beginner's book, not only on C2 but on game design in general.

> Now if someone would just write a book on how to do a RPG in Construct, I'd be happy (or should I do it myself?).

>

Regarding the RPG, Ashley wrote somewhat of a tutorial early this year that could be the start of an RPG book.

https://www.scirra.com/blog/142/make-online-multiplayer-games-with-construct-2

I just went over to Amazon and bought the book. Worth the $5 for sure! The book explains lots of things about game design (but in a way I could easily skip through) and does go through in detail how to do Pong, Brick Breaker, and Asteroids. Definitely cool. Thank you, frn2000, for the tip!

I'll look at Ashley's tutorial, but I think it is time I tackled this. As soon as I get back (I'm still on the road), I'll start working on it. I'm still 50/50 on the fence about whether I should write it in raw HTML5 or Construct 2, but maybe I can prototype in Construct 2 and then do a later version in raw. I'll probably continue to do things in my Firefox OS blog first.

By the way, I noticed something very strange. When I went to look up something about Construct 2 and Googled "Construct 2" my review on my blog came up very high (5th) overall, but as some kind of Google+ listing https://plus.google.com/+BobThulfram/posts/Ff2o268xaUK. I still have no idea how Google+ works, but it's nice if it promotes Construct 2!