Using Tiled (or similar) as a level editor

[deepthaw]

I've started work on a shmup in C/SDL just for the learning experience of it. I don't have the mental energy right now to build a dedicated level editor so I've decided to use an existing tool and build tools to convert the output to something my game can work with.

Has anybody used Tiled (https://www.mapeditor.org/)in this manner for a shmup? Some of its features are obviously useful (multiple layers, custom attributes, etc.) but was also wondering if anybody had any tips/ideas on how they ended up getting Tiled to represent stuff like varying entity types, camera regions, just anything that might seem non-intuitive.

[Ixmucane2]

A few years ago the Bitmap Brothers made Xenon 2000, a modern PC remake of Xenon 2, using Mappy, a tile map editor in the same category as Tiled. It might be worth studying.
You can open the plain "FMP" project file and see the whole level.

Home page https://web.archive.org/web/20110709021 ... /index.htm
Download https://archive.org/details/Xenon_2000_Project_PCF
Sources https://github.com/videogamepreservation/xenon2000/, specifically https://github.com/videogamepreservatio ... out/levels
Mappy https://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php

[badcomputer0]

I use Tiled to construct maps for my Sega Master System shmup. I have a couple of separate scripts (in Python) that parse the tmx file. One script pulls out the background tiles and exports to binary and the other converts the ground spawn layer of the tmx into a C array.

Even without tools you can export a tmx tile layer as CSV and copy those (or use a script) into a C array for example.