Tileset limit

[Kazeon]

IMHO, the most annoying limit on wc3 is map filesize limit. But in the second place is tile limit per map, it's just ridic limit I dont know why blizzard give limit to it. what for? So my question: is that really impossible to remove the limit? JNGP has extension to have extended limit of tile but still I think it's not enough..

 

[LordDz]

Use triggers to create the tiles you want?
Environment - Change terrain type at bla bla.

 

[Kazeon]

that's not a good practice I bet there is no one would do it :'D

 

[WerBackIII]

LordDz, that's not a solution - the limit is still there.

 

[LordDz]

LordDz, that's not a solution - the limit is still there.

Yes, I know. But it's one way of doing it and if there are no other ways, enjoy your triggering terraining!

 

[WerBackIII]

No, I mean that even with triggers you can't use more tiles than the limit. It’s because of the way the format works. It’s just impossible, at least for now, and definitely without a custom exe.

 

[LordDz]

Oh, well look at that.

 

[Adiktuz]

well you could recode the engine and the editor to do that... remember that wc3 is already very OLD...

 

[PurgeandFire]

Wc3 only reserves a particular number of bytes available for tiles, AFAIK. If you exceed that, then wc3 can't read the map properly. That is why 16 is considered a hardcoded limit. So no, it can't be extended, sadly.

But fret not, there are awesome alternatives:
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/skins-552/epicrpgtileset_by67chrome-blp-134301/

So you actually don't really need more than 16 tiles.

 

[Kazeon]

well, that's maybe the only solution to have more variations, how sad. it's a "powerful" tool they said.

 

[Adiktuz]

It is powerful, especially if you had it right from when it was released... come on, Wc3 was out for a decade already... and oh don't forget that it's only a world editor, it's not even a full game creation engine...

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Use 12-13 full fledged tiles combined with 2-3 multi-tiles and you pretty much have all the freedom you ever need.

The trick is to design those full fledged tiles to match with most of the multi tile variants for maximum flexibility. And not waste a full-tile slot on stuff you only use rarely.

Only make full-tiles on textures that need borders. Everything that is layered below can be part of a multi-tile.

 

[Kazeon]

Use 12-13 full fledged tiles combined with 2-3 multi-tiles and you pretty much have all the freedom you ever need.

The trick is to design those full fledged tiles to match with most of the multi tile variants for maximum flexibility. And not waste a full-tile slot on stuff you only use rarely.

Only make full-tiles on textures that need borders. Everything that is layered below can be part of a multi-tile.

true, but determining which tile will has the edge/border is another problem.. z

 

[Dr Super Good]

The main reason for the tile limit is the silly people working on the WC3 engine thought that saving a few bits per node was meaningful so they made the node value identifying tile type only 4 bits long. This means it can represent exactly 16 different tile types even if those 16 different tile types all link to the same tile type implementation.

What is even more silly is WC3 also reserves 4 bits for cliff type per node. This means that WC3 can technically represent up to 16 different cliff types however some other limitation with the resolving of unique cliff types results in only the first two being loaded and any other value used resulting in pretty buggy block cliffs.

There is also no limit to how big your tileset is. You could make it so that most of the size of your map is just your tileset with a million copies of the same tile reference in it. Still the game can only access the first 16 declared tiles as that is all the "addressing" the nodes define.

There may or may not be some limit beyond this based on texture size and binding them to graphic objects. I recall being unable to recreate such problems even with exotic tile sets made of huge textures.