Ok, so I’m trying to decide whether or not I should code my own tile engine, or if I should use Tiled with MonoGame.Extended. A lot of old games I’ve played use raw binary files, for example: Stardew Valley. And I’m wondering if anyone who’s made an rpg/sandbox game using XNA has any advice on this. The reason I got into MonoGame was because I was tired of the fact that in Unity, so many features were out of my control, and it was completely closed source. However, I’m wondering if using external software like Tiled could lead me down that path again. The bigger question I have is, now that there is so many third party software options, is it no longer worth coding every last detail, if there’s a way to get around it? Thanks.
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This is the very reason why I am writing my own engine…
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Tiled uses a simple format (TMX) and you’ll have to write your own renderer. Parsers are open source.
Why don’t you start with Tiled and if you don’t like the editor, make your own down the road? You can build off the TMX format.
The plus to Tiled is you have an editor to work with which is great. There are a number of sources available for reading TMX maps in C#. MonoGame.Extended is a very good one because it allows you to just use the Content Pipeline and not worry about it. Eventually you will probably want to go with your own tile engine because you will find that Tiled doesn’t have all the features that you’re looking for. It is great to have that control but the negative is you don’t have an editor that has all of your features included in it. Once you’ve finished with it though it is easy to implement new features as required.
One non tiled option that I love is allowing tile editing while you are playing the game. It allows for very fast development and easy play testing.