Metatiles - In a Nutshell by Pix3M

Absolutely fantastic!

This is a great tutorial. It's worth mentioning that the original Sonic the Hedgehog games used metatiles. The Sonic game levels are made of 128x128 tiles, which were created using 16x16 sprites.

Thanks for sharing this!

Love it! Thank you, Pix3m

If you offset the tiles by 50% you only need to calculate the N/NE/NW neighboring tiles, so you can have a 2x2 grid of metatiles (just 16 variations per terrain type) further if you use an alpha channel and render several layers in multiple passes you can limit yourself to 16 tiles per terrain type, and also have feature tiles to go on top.

Like this:
www.mediafire.com/view/8jby2yl…

The base set you show there looks like suitable input for Tiled's terrain (which basically does the handling of simple edge blending, where you can draw solid grass or stone, and it uses your blending tiles to make stuff fit in.). I mention this because that means you can make your (single layer) tilemap with the smaller 'metatiles' and then generate the needed full size tiles from a bitmap export of the map.

Good examples and explanation Pix3m, going to be saving /using this to refer to in the future.

This is useful, not only for games but creating scenery aswell

Very well done tutorial, you picked a very good palette too!

These are also known as Wang tiles/tiling - programming-wise there are some good papers under that term, particularly a GPU Gems article.

Also, you explain things well.  I like how you walk us through the thought behind it.

Reminds me a lot of Warcraft 2 map editing.

Hey, what about hex metatiles?  I imagine those might look less gridlike, though straight paths might be weird to do.  I guess some games must have done it, by now.  I never thought much about it.

This would be a very interesting thing to try and program on a random level generator in games via RPG maker or Flash; if: variant.soliddirt = 2x.2y(); addChild.externaldirts(1-8);

Sorry; got some pseudo ActionScript 3.0 codes stuck in my head after class today, and I don't even like programming; however, thinking about its potentials is a different matter, and this resource you made got me to thinking in regards to 2D random level generators It's very well done!

lol thought this was pokemon at first XD

cool

Very usefull.

This is a very interesting tutorial

"With an appropriate art style, like one on the right [...]" I think you meant on the left, but apart from that it's a really good tutorial!