Scratch

What do you mean by tile maps

Last edited by muppetds (2011-03-15 13:39:59)

It's actually a very good solution.

My concern is, however, about the younger and newer Scratchers. These have little or no experience of scratching, and in most cases programming in general.
Tiling is a pretty hard concept to grasp at a young age and takes time to get it perfect even for a teenager/adult.

Another point is that it would add much more work to make a simple project (not to mention the extra programming the Scratch Team would have to undertake).

My final reason against tiles: Scratch is intended for a wide range of people. With its easy methods of programming, it welcomes animators, game makers, utility makers, story tellers and simulators all in a single program.
Tiles, as far as my knowledge goes, are not very useful when creating a sunset scene or a semi-3D plane simulation.

Of course, they have their advantages. You already pointed them out in the first post, so no need to repeat. My job was to be negative, and I think I succeeded 

archmage wrote:

1. Scratch already has things much more complex than tilemaps. Trig, lists, variables, all more complicated.

All someone has to do is draw out tiles with an interface like this: http://www.emanueleferonato.com/downloa … cEdior.swf

2. This isn't really meant for projects with a simple drawn image background. Projects with more intricate backgrounds (like those in platform games) are done much more inefficiently with the draw tool.

3. Tiles are usually not useful for drawing things like sunsets but neither are variables or math functions but who can deny the usefulness of those? Tile maps would make particular projects MUCH easier and allow users to develop transferable skills.

It would still discourage the non programming users.

Not difficult, but useless therefore making them think they absolutely need to learn programming to use that awesome feature. Not all community members have the same interests.

By non-programmers I meant people who use scratch for artwork instead of games.

archmage wrote:

How do they need to learn programming to use the tilemap feature? You draw tiles on a map, that is it. Scratch already has more difficult features like lists and math functions and that has not discouraged non programmers.

(rolleyes) They see this feature, want to use it, but don't need it for artwork.
They feel discouraged because no one thought about them.

To be honest, Scratch has very inadequate art tools and artists are better off using programs like GIMP. But who can deny such a friendly community?

It can be used for art work though

Look at this picture

It would be far too difficult to draw something like this manually. Our artist friend could stamp each square manually (which is what people already do) but this is tedious. Or they could use the tiling tool to create such a nice background. There is absolutely no programming involving during this process.

Also the argument that art users would be discouraged doesn't make sense since:
1. This tool is about as easy to use as the art tool
2. More difficult features have been introduced without upsetting users

archmage wrote:

It can be used for art work though

Look at this picture http://mapeditor.org/screenshots/003.png

It would be far too difficult to draw something like this manually. Our artist friend could stamp each square manually (which is what people already do) but this is tedious. Or they could use the tiling tool to create such a nice background. There is absolutely no programming involving during this process.

Also the argument that art users would be discouraged doesn't make sense since:
1. This tool is about as easy to use as the art tool
2. More difficult features have been introduced without upsetting users

I shall repeat myself once more. It's not the difficulty.
You make a good point there, but that kind of art you show is again used mainly for programmers. The type of art on scratch is like this.
I doubt tiles would help with that.

Last edited by LS97 (2011-03-15 14:47:09)

archmage wrote:

Tiles are good for ANY type of art with repeating images. So things like

-bricks
-grass
-dirt
-sky
-walls

That is only 1 kind of art, and even that could benefit by having a tile made background.

I have to go have dinner now. How about you take a nice look at the world of Scratch out there, and get an idea of what kind of art is used in Scratch (by artists)?

archmage wrote:

Yes I understand that a lot of art is based on characters, wolfs, people, funny characters, other things. But this is not the only kind of art that exists.

I also don't understand why your main opposition is based on "it isn't very useful for artists so it should not be included". Lists and variables are useless for art, yet they are key features of the program. It is useful for general art, but not as much as the art tool.

Like I said before, I think the dislike of this feature comes from it not being familiar. A cloning block would also have the issues you describe (bad for artists, a bit harder to use) yet when asked the Scratch community unanimously declares it a much needed feature.

I don't support cloning as such. Sprites behaving as classes would achieve the same (of not better) results and would prepare better for moving on to any other language.

I am familiar with tiling, I use it all the time in my flash games. Your argument is totally valid. But whereas trigonometry and lists are almost hidden, tiling would become a major feature. They're two different cases.

My main opposition is rather the fact that tiling is not as easy to master than simple bitmap drawing like the current method Scratch implements, especially for newer and younger programmers. But you shifted onto a different subject, so I followed.

Good night (at least for me).

archmage wrote:

It can be used for art work though

Look at this picture http://mapeditor.org/screenshots/003.png

It would be far too difficult to draw something like this manually. Our artist friend could stamp each square manually (which is what people already do) but this is tedious. Or they could use the tiling tool to create such a nice background. There is absolutely no programming involving during this process.

Also the argument that art users would be discouraged doesn't make sense since:
1. This tool is about as easy to use as the art tool
2. More difficult features have been introduced without upsetting users

O_O what tileset is that? looks cool


oh, right. forgot.

yeah, i support cause it'll make rpgs easier.

Last edited by kayybee (2011-03-15 19:22:06)

Just about every object-oriented programming language out there has a feature like this. Scrolling in Scratch is way more difficult than it needs to be, especially for a "beginner" language.

Also, I'm loving the arguments against this. It's discouraging to artists? Are they being forced to use it? Besides, Scratch's "pre-drawn sprites only" limit already discourages lots of programmers from making games with more than one screen. Tilemaps would only do good.

archmage wrote:

Well, pure programming languages don't have tilemaps, they have to be coded. But other languages are fully capable of doing these things while Scratch is not. Also Scratch likes to simplify things that are already possible (like with the move block) so why not give people this feature.

While its not the feature of other lanaguges almost every other simple programming tool has this. playcrafter, Stencyl (which so many people here rave about), game maker, RPG maker, all have tilemaps as a central development tool.

scratch has a tilemap. one with a pixel per tile 

anyways, maybe you should do it on another program then?

but that ruins the purpose that we already have a base...