Blocks that aren't blobs - TRENCH RUN KEY IF ANYONE MANAGES TO GET IT TO WORK

You missed the guy who's been actually doing this, @8x - its fiddly stuff, and TR makes it simpler by "removing" all the vanilla blocks and starting fresh, but I believe 8x's mod has custom tiles and vanilla ones, so he's probably the guy to ask.

 

Blobs collide a bit differently but can have logic.
Tiles use tile collision and can affect lighting properly. Attaching logic to them requires a lot of extra code.
Basically for something dynamic (doors etc) a blob is the way to go but if you just want coloured floor or something else en masse then a tile would be better - you dont want 10000 blobs just to fill a 100x100 area solid.

 

You could do it by changing the hitter code and having custom tile destruction logic (so when you hit one tile it damages the "other half" - but no, 2x1 tiles are not supported by the tilemap "natively" - the whole point of a tilemap is that it just renders simply based on whatever is in each tile, so you dont need any special logic to look up if it's a 2x1 tile and do more clever things. Those systems unfortunately have to be built on top (or as blobs) to keep it fast.

 

Questions are:
what function do you want the block to have? cosmetic only? will it be solid or background? do you want it to be destructible by explosives? can it be digged by builders or knights? what resources do you need for laying it? how much support will it offer to tiles above it?

What I managed to do is cosmetic tiles, none of them can be placeable via builder menu (I never tried to implement it at the menu however) or give you resources when you dig, hell they're actually undestructible somehow :D. These also are a bit fishy in terms of support, sometimes they will fall if they're standing on a specific tile-like blob. @Osmal might help here as well

For TWK I did solid blocks and non solid blocks, both in background and frontground. For 2x2 or higher tiles you can always simply make 4 or more different tiles and auto-tile them when you build them up (something like old cata building in Classic). For this, as I wasn't able to make the autotiling for the map loaders, I put pixels one by one at the maps (yeah, it's a torture, but I liked it).

A great thing (or simply good :>) for modders would be the possibility of copy/paste vanilla tiles and make their "support value - resource count - damage count - tile flags" easily moddable.

Moreover:
The CustomBlock example from MM is a bit misleading. I made this thread to clarify things: https://forum.thd.vg/threads/implementing-custom-tiles-not-blobs-at-the-map-loaders.25694/

 

Not possible currently. The health of tiles is totally misleading. The amount of hits it can take is defined by how many frames of damage we had.

It's possible to store damage externally in a custom tileset implementation but its not done in vanilla at all.

@8x and other interested parties
Re: would be nice to copy-paste vanilla tiles - the vanilla tiles are "defined" in a ~1300 line cpp file of spaghetti logic. The code at the moment basically checks the following:

• If vanilla tiles are completely turned off - if so it goes straight to script hooks
• If vanilla tiles are on, if the tile is <=255, use legacy hooks
  
• else use script hooks

The most important script hooks available:

Code:

//when the hitter functions are called - damage is passed in but storing it is fiddly and best done outside the tilemap
//returns the tile to be placed at `index`, given that `oldTileType` was hit with `damage`
//only called serverside so dont do any visual/audio effects here.
TileType server_onTileHit(CMap@ this, f32 damage, u32 index, TileType oldTileType)
//for making sounds and effects based on tile changes - called on both server and client
void onSetTile(CMap@ map, u32 index, TileType newtile, TileType oldtile)

Note: these hooks HAVE TO go in the map loader file (and are best put in an included file so you can easily add more map formats).

You're better off looking at trench run map code (PNGLoader in particular) than trying to "reinvent" vanilla.

Re: builder placing them
The builder can place whatever tile numbers it likes into the tilemap, the issue is setting up those numbers to be something meaningful.
If you look at MapCommon.as in trench run as well, you'll see that we've defined a big enum of all the blocks - you can do this for your custom tiles that "live in harmony" with the vanilla tiles as well, you just need to start from 256 instead of 0.

 

sounds good, locking thread.