The map file used for the collision level manager in Rapid Pygame is a very simple tile map. While the format is easy to understand, it is not easy for editing in a text editor. To make designing level easy and fast, Rapid Pygame provides an utility that converts to and from native .tmx Tiled map file. Since Tiled is well established and easy to use, using it for level editing should be painless and effective.
The converter can be executed using python -m rapidpg *file* file is required and points to either a Tiled map file(.tmx) or a Rapid Pygame Format of map file. The data encoding of the Tiled file must be CSV. When converting from Rapid Pygame to Tiled, the Rapid Pygame map must also have its tile images in the tiles folder in the same directory
There are extra options outlined in python -m rapidpg -h
While all Tiled map file with CSV data encoding will convert successfully into a map file, the level might not be handled correctly by the collision level manager. The layers in the Tiled file must be structured as follows. Order is important.
For clarity, each item is formatted as <layer name> <layer type> <description>
Controls Object
This layer is optional and can have a up to 2 unique objects, the objects must be rectangles and with type exit or spawn. Their location and/or size will be converted into the exit and spawn config field of the Rapid Pygame map
map Tile
The landscape of the level. If more than 9 tile images are used, the converter assumes the name of the tile images are alphabet letters. The 10th tile is converted into a and continues following alphabetical order. When lower case letters run out, upper case is used. The maximum number of unique tile images is 61
Animations Object
Objects that are animated on the map. Each object in this layer correspond to a config entry in the map. The name of each object will be the folder name under the animations folder and the type will be the interval between frames.
<background name> <speed> Image
A background layer, multiple of these can exist for making parallax effect. The name is in the exact format of the background config field. The order they will be rendered is bottom to top.
Extra config fields can be specified by editing map properties. (Map ‣ Map properties...) Layers that reflect a config field such as the Control layer are prioritized over these fields when there is a conflict. When the Collision field is unspecified, all tiles are marked as collidable
If a well-formed map is converted to the other format and back, the level should remain the same; the files before and after might not be identical, as the order of the config fields might be changed.