Monogame Extended Tiled

Question

I'm making an isometric city builder using Monogame Extended and Tiled. I've got everything set-up and now i need to somehow access the specific tiles so i can change them at runtime as the user clicks on a tile to build an object. The problem is, i can't seem to find a "map.GetLayer("Layername").GetTile(x,y) or .SetTile(x,y) function or something similar.

Now what i can do is edit the xml(.tmx) file which has a matrix in it that represents the map and it's drawn tiles. The problem with this is that i need to build the map in the content pipeline again after editing for the changes to be displayed. I can't really build at runtime or can i?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Something like this will get you part way there.

var tileLayer = map.GetLayer<TiledMapTileLayer>("layername");

TiledMapTile tile;

if(tileLayer.TryGetTile(x, y, out tile))
{
     // do something with tile
}

However, there's only a limited amount of things you can actually do with the tile once you've got it from the map.

There's no such thing as a SetTile method because changing tile data at runtime is not currently supported. This is a limitation of the renderer, which has been optimized for rendering very large maps by building static geometry that can't be changed once it's loaded into the graphics card.

There has been some discussion about building another renderer that would handle dynamic map changes but at this stage nothing like that has been implemented in the library. You could always have a go at implementing a simple renderer yourself, a really basic one is not as hard as you might think.

An alternative approach to dealing with this kind of problem might be to pre-process the map data before giving it to the renderer. The idea would be to effectively separate the layers of the map that are static from those that are dynamic and render the dynamic tiles as normal sprites. Just a thought, I'm not sure about the details of how this might work.

I plan to eventually revisit the Tiled API in the next major version of MonoGame.Extended. Don't hold your breath, these things can take a lot of time, but I am paying attention to the feedback and kinds of problems people are experiencing with the existing API.