Hello everyone,
A few months ago, I started with creating tilesets and tilemaps. Drawing inspiration from classic isometric games like Populous, my goal was to capture the same perspective and atmosphere in my own game. However, I soon found out that Tilengine does not support diamond isometric tiles natively, which made the implementation very challenging. To use such a tileset, I had to divide a pre-rendered (animated) image into square tiles.
One of the major difficulties I faced was incorporating animated tiles into an orthographic tileset with isometric graphics, like flickering torches, spinning windmills, and other dynamic elements. The process of manually extracting pre-rendered animation frames, slicing them into tiles, filtering out duplicates, organizing them, and creating the tilesets and tilemaps turned out to be extremely tedious and time-consuming.
Motivated by the desire to simplify this process, I took it upon myself to develop a tool that automates the conversion from an animated image. The result is a command-line tool I named "Animation2Tilemap". This tool is not limited to GIFs; it can also work with other types of animations, such as a folder of extracted video frames. However, I recommend using it with small and simple animations, as large and complex ones may result in very large tilesets that are not practical for game development. Nevertheless, it can be a fun way to experiment with different sources of animation and see what you can create with them. Please let me know if you have any feedback or questions.
You can find this tool here: https://github.com/vonhoff/Animation2Tilemap
(Leave a star if you're using it in your projects
)
For example, let’s say you have this animated GIF image of an isometric scene:
![[Image: ZVsbn9D.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/ZVsbn9D.gif)
By using this tool, you can convert it into this animated tileset and tilemap (PNG, TSX and TMX file):
![[Image: 1Ehg1Uw.png]](https://i.imgur.com/1Ehg1Uw.png)
A few months ago, I started with creating tilesets and tilemaps. Drawing inspiration from classic isometric games like Populous, my goal was to capture the same perspective and atmosphere in my own game. However, I soon found out that Tilengine does not support diamond isometric tiles natively, which made the implementation very challenging. To use such a tileset, I had to divide a pre-rendered (animated) image into square tiles.
One of the major difficulties I faced was incorporating animated tiles into an orthographic tileset with isometric graphics, like flickering torches, spinning windmills, and other dynamic elements. The process of manually extracting pre-rendered animation frames, slicing them into tiles, filtering out duplicates, organizing them, and creating the tilesets and tilemaps turned out to be extremely tedious and time-consuming.
Motivated by the desire to simplify this process, I took it upon myself to develop a tool that automates the conversion from an animated image. The result is a command-line tool I named "Animation2Tilemap". This tool is not limited to GIFs; it can also work with other types of animations, such as a folder of extracted video frames. However, I recommend using it with small and simple animations, as large and complex ones may result in very large tilesets that are not practical for game development. Nevertheless, it can be a fun way to experiment with different sources of animation and see what you can create with them. Please let me know if you have any feedback or questions.
You can find this tool here: https://github.com/vonhoff/Animation2Tilemap
(Leave a star if you're using it in your projects
)For example, let’s say you have this animated GIF image of an isometric scene:
By using this tool, you can convert it into this animated tileset and tilemap (PNG, TSX and TMX file):