#tilemaptown — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #tilemaptown, aggregated by home.social.
-
Doodle boards in Tilemap Town now have a proper client-side UI that should be a lot nicer to use than the server-side setup you previously had to use, that was more of a proof of concept.
Wanting to make sure I'm not making the protocol too convoluted is an ever-present design consideration, but I think I found a good solution; I made it so that if a client modifies a doodle board's image, the change gets saved onto the item.
Could eventually take the stuff I built out for this and make a way to draw map tiles and player graphics directly in the game!
-
Doodle boards in Tilemap Town now have a proper client-side UI that should be a lot nicer to use than the server-side setup you previously had to use, that was more of a proof of concept.
Wanting to make sure I'm not making the protocol too convoluted is an ever-present design consideration, but I think I found a good solution; I made it so that if a client modifies a doodle board's image, the change gets saved onto the item.
Could eventually take the stuff I built out for this and make a way to draw map tiles and player graphics directly in the game!
-
Using custom map tile graphics in Tilemap Town has always been kind of clunky, though gradually less so over time.
Because tiles need properties, you can't directly go from an uploaded image to being able to place those tiles onto the map, so I tried to make a tool that lets you assign properties to tiles in groups instead of one-by-one.
I also redesigned the UI for creating a new item, and the item types are grouped and have descriptions next to them. Now creating a doodle board is easy; clicking the button creates a 32x32 canvas with the DB32 palette.
-
Using custom map tile graphics in Tilemap Town has always been kind of clunky, though gradually less so over time.
Because tiles need properties, you can't directly go from an uploaded image to being able to place those tiles onto the map, so I tried to make a tool that lets you assign properties to tiles in groups instead of one-by-one.
I also redesigned the UI for creating a new item, and the item types are grouped and have descriptions next to them. Now creating a doodle board is easy; clicking the button creates a 32x32 canvas with the DB32 palette.
-
Probably should have written this article years ago: https://wiki.novasquirrel.com/index.php?title=How_to_host_Tilemap_Town
You can just run a Python script and get a usable server with no configuration, but ideally you would want admin privileges on your account and encrypted connections, so I lay out how to do that here.
I realized that other people aren't going to automatically know how to configure a reverse proxy, or realize that the server is expecting you to do that.
-
Probably should have written this article years ago: https://wiki.novasquirrel.com/index.php?title=How_to_host_Tilemap_Town
You can just run a Python script and get a usable server with no configuration, but ideally you would want admin privileges on your account and encrypted connections, so I lay out how to do that here.
I realized that other people aren't going to automatically know how to configure a reverse proxy, or realize that the server is expecting you to do that.
-
In yesterday's Tilemap Town Tuesday I showed of the new feature in https://tilemap.town/ where you can create a doodle board to draw on, and people drew a bunch of stuff. We ended up making a little art gallery attached to the library to hold some pictures people made.
Didn't really hear opinions on if people liked or disliked the limited drawing setup, but it took some people a bit to figure out how colors worked on it.
I do think I'm going to have to figure out a way to improve the UI without complicating the protocol too much; currently you get menus private messaged to you with buttons you can click on (that may get more menus sent to you), and it would probably help a ton if the chat had tabs and you could click one that only showed private messages (as in Pony Town).
-
In yesterday's Tilemap Town Tuesday I showed of the new feature in https://tilemap.town/ where you can create a doodle board to draw on, and people drew a bunch of stuff. We ended up making a little art gallery attached to the library to hold some pictures people made.
Didn't really hear opinions on if people liked or disliked the limited drawing setup, but it took some people a bit to figure out how colors worked on it.
I do think I'm going to have to figure out a way to improve the UI without complicating the protocol too much; currently you get menus private messaged to you with buttons you can click on (that may get more menus sent to you), and it would probably help a ton if the chat had tabs and you could click one that only showed private messages (as in Pony Town).
-
I got the Tilemap Town Qt desktop app to the point where it can log in and display the top left corner of a map (in this case it's just a test server where I was debugging some 3DS client issues.) I also pushed the code to https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/TilemapTownDesktop/
From here I guess I just need to display entities, and take input to let you move a character around (redrawing the screen as needed to scroll) and then that will be a very basic, usable client. Probably would be good to make a basic window where you can enter login info too, and then this proof-of-concept will be good enough for now.
-
I got the Tilemap Town Qt desktop app to the point where it can log in and display the top left corner of a map (in this case it's just a test server where I was debugging some 3DS client issues.) I also pushed the code to https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/TilemapTownDesktop/
From here I guess I just need to display entities, and take input to let you move a character around (redrawing the screen as needed to scroll) and then that will be a very basic, usable client. Probably would be good to make a basic window where you can enter login info too, and then this proof-of-concept will be good enough for now.
-
https://blog.novasquirrel.com/tilemap-town/december-2025-updates In December 2025, Tilemap Town got custom name colors, doodle boards, projectile shooters, UI improvements on phones, the ability to send someone a URL to show them a map, and more. The protocol documentation was also improved for clarity. I also started working on a Qt desktop app client as a proof-of-concept.
-
https://blog.novasquirrel.com/tilemap-town/december-2025-updates In December 2025, Tilemap Town got custom name colors, doodle boards, projectile shooters, UI improvements on phones, the ability to send someone a URL to show them a map, and more. The protocol documentation was also improved for clarity. I also started working on a Qt desktop app client as a proof-of-concept.
-
Spent a bunch of time recently going through Tilemap Town's protocol document and revising it to be clearer: https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/TilemapTown/blob/main/docs/protocol.txt
I guess it really sticks out among most virtual worlds for even publishing this kind of information in the first place. Second Life is the main other one that I know of that does.Previously the document relied mostly on examples and just kind of hoping the examples communicated the purposes of fields, so I tried to be more explicit about that.
Also made some protocol changes as a result of looking over it (decided that something that was an extension was harmless to have just be a base thing, and fixed some things that I figured should work but weren't actually fully supported.)
-
Spent a bunch of time recently going through Tilemap Town's protocol document and revising it to be clearer: https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/TilemapTown/blob/main/docs/protocol.txt
I guess it really sticks out among most virtual worlds for even publishing this kind of information in the first place. Second Life is the main other one that I know of that does.Previously the document relied mostly on examples and just kind of hoping the examples communicated the purposes of fields, so I tried to be more explicit about that.
Also made some protocol changes as a result of looking over it (decided that something that was an extension was harmless to have just be a base thing, and fixed some things that I figured should work but weren't actually fully supported.)
-
I added a bunch of built-in server-side behaviors to Tilemap Town that you can put on objects without having to program anything. Included in there is a behavior for making an object draggable, making it display text over itself, a projectile shooter, something that steps through frames once per click (useful for levers, or Minecraft-style cake), and a doodle board you can draw on.
The doodle boards use a feature I added before in which an entity can display its own mini tilemap over itself - in this case using this tileset: https://tilemap.town/img/mini_tilemap/bitmap.png
Which means you've got 1-bit art with attribute clash and specific hardcoded pairs of colors (though you can get different ones with a different tileset image, like https://tilemap.town/img/mini_tilemap/bitmap_black.png always has black for a background) - I hope that's actually interesting to work with instead of frustrating. A lot of the goal of Tilemap Town is to have a small but very flexible protocol for easy client implementation. -
I added a bunch of built-in server-side behaviors to Tilemap Town that you can put on objects without having to program anything. Included in there is a behavior for making an object draggable, making it display text over itself, a projectile shooter, something that steps through frames once per click (useful for levers, or Minecraft-style cake), and a doodle board you can draw on.
The doodle boards use a feature I added before in which an entity can display its own mini tilemap over itself - in this case using this tileset: https://tilemap.town/img/mini_tilemap/bitmap.png
Which means you've got 1-bit art with attribute clash and specific hardcoded pairs of colors (though you can get different ones with a different tileset image, like https://tilemap.town/img/mini_tilemap/bitmap_black.png always has black for a background) - I hope that's actually interesting to work with instead of frustrating. A lot of the goal of Tilemap Town is to have a small but very flexible protocol for easy client implementation. -
I added custom name colors to Tilemap Town, built on top of a feature where you can associate arbitrary metadata with your character. I'm surprised I didn't think to add this earlier since it's such a simple feature; I added it to help with keeping track of chat that's especially busy with a lot of people involved. I previously added a "de-emphasize chat from people who are too far away" feature as another solution to this, so it's funny that I thought of the more complicated approach first.
-
I added custom name colors to Tilemap Town, built on top of a feature where you can associate arbitrary metadata with your character. I'm surprised I didn't think to add this earlier since it's such a simple feature; I added it to help with keeping track of chat that's especially busy with a lot of people involved. I previously added a "de-emphasize chat from people who are too far away" feature as another solution to this, so it's funny that I thought of the more complicated approach first.
