Hello!

I'm looking for a tool that can take one big image and create a (square) tile set of a given size with which the original image can be approximated.

The use case is for example 2D strategy or role playing games. I would paint a nice world map with some existing tool, say 4096x4096 pixels, and then pass the image to this tool, which I'm looking for, and ask it to create a maximum of 256 tiles of size 32x32, which could be assembled to almost look like the original map, but of course with much less memory being used.

The tool would need to identify, for example, that 20% of the map is deep water, which looks very uniform, and can be replaced by 5 water tiles. Optional ideas would be to allow things like flipped or rotated tiles, depending on the capabilities of the target engine.

Does such a tool exist? If not, do you think it would be useful? I think for my current game idea it would be great, because I'm not good at painting pretty tiles by hand but there are very good general map painting tools available. So I'm thinking about trying to write such a tool myself, if none exist.

What map painting tools are you thinking of? A lot of the time there are already “tile” textures, but some systems blend them dynamically along the borders, combining all the adjacent textures at that point, rather than having a specific set of hand made transition images.

If it is the former, you could look to just implement such a rendering routine.

I'm specifically thinking about inkarnate.com, which is, AFAICS, not primarily targeting computer games. I didn't find any tiling-tools there.

I have a feeling that tools which have the tiles first and then let me draw a map using these tiles are too restrictive because I don't know which shapes things will have and what tiles I need beforehand.

On the other hand I'd like to keep the final rendering simple and fast, without too much cleverness in blending tiles and shapes to fit.