Really bad tiling problem with Mac apps

MarkOnTheIron

I finally managed to publish a Mac app but then I realised that the tiles in some scenes had a black line between them.

I'm using a 32x32 actor with the "Tile" option that I resized to a 100x3000 instance on one scene. On the iPad and iPhone version of this game everything works perfectly, but on the Mac I have this hideous black lines.

Here is a picture:

gyroscope

@MarkOnTheIron

Hi Mark, sorry to hear that... I had (in fact, still have until I update) a similar problem in my one and only app in the store.... although this wasn't involving tiles, it involved placing square pieces in exact positions, where no lines should show, but some still did.

I have got the idea that if I remake the images with transparency ( even though it's not needed, of course) then the problem will disappear.

So... perhaps this'll be the same for your tile image, i.e remake it with transparency and the hopefully that'll sort it.... fingers crossed....

MarkOnTheIron

In the end I resolved by getting rid of the tiles and using on big image. Since it's a Mac game there's no real performance problem but it is really annoying though.

DeadlySeriousMedia

i noticed this. You need to manually toy with the size very carefully by dragging the edges around. Also, is helps if you resize by a whole number multiple of the original image size.

MarkOnTheIron

@DeadlySeriousMedia I have 32x32 tiles with a 64x64 image and I always make sure that the actor that uses the tile is resized to a multiple of the tile. But that doesn't help

I also tried to change it to various sizes but also that didn't help, as didn't help adding some transparency.

DeadlySeriousMedia

Hmm...Not sure what the problem would be then.

machinegunkelly

I have the same problem aswell, tile sizes are set correctly, etc etc.... but I get a 1px gap between ever single tile...

I've hidden it with speed, but if the right color is behind it, it's a real eyesore....

That said, I have the same problem in corona, I think it's a lua thing involving math or something

ThinkingGarden

Tiling is very broken in this release. I went back and forth with tech support over it in the days after 0.10 released. As others have suggested, my only recourse was to replace my tiled actors with exact sized graphics that were properly tiled offline from Gamesalad before import (i.e. Photoshop).

Omenabo

The same problem has been at least in the last two versions of gamesalad. It's actually a really big problem, if you don't notice it right at the start.

Plz fix it, ok thx!

iPavel

I didn't have this problem two versions ago, but with the latest one it's a horror! My whole game is messed up now.

If it's not going to be fixed anytime soon, at least we need a solution to avoid it happening.

Vidchart

@SaladStraightShooter is this issue fixed in 0.11?

Hymloe

Ah yes! I'm really glad other people are bringing this problem up.

My suspicion is that it's a bilinear filtering issue. Or something like that.

I reported it as a bug today, amongst a few other bugs I submitted.

They really need to address this problem, as it's put a hold to one of my games which uses a grid of actors. Big black lines between them no matter what I try.

You can reduce the occurrence by trying all those things with making sure they're an even number width and height, and trying to make them double or half the size of the original texture, etc, but I have not found any way to get it working perfectly.

It all looks fine in the Game Salad Viewer on my Mac, but I get the black lines on iPod Touch 3, iPod Touch 4, and iPad 2 (all of my devices).

I'm glad you included that picture at the top, @MarkOnTheIron good work, makes it nice and clear.

I've tried overlapping my actors, doesn't work. The lines are drawn on the actor itself, so there's no escaping the top layer being shown somewhere.

MarkOnTheIron

@Hymloe Just to be clear this thread is for Mac published games. The same game published on iOS or Android doesn't have this problem and I'm using tiles extensively.

mrpacogp

I have the same problem and have tested alot of sizes and methods with images

POM

@Hymloe Just to be clear this thread is for Mac published games. The same game published on iOS or Android doesn't have this problem and I'm using tiles extensively.

Unfortunately mate, this problem occurs on any device and I've contact GS about this few time and they did not even reply to me.. makes you wonder if you send all those bug reports in vain .. @SaladStraightShooter

This occurs on my iPad2, ipad mini, iphone 4S, iphone 5, any device..
I wish GS will finally address this issue..


Roy.

mrpacogp

I just have tested one thing.
I have created a new actor, put a new image, repeat the same system of tile and not have the line between the tiles...

ADSentertainment

Are you placing each individual tile on the scene manually? That's usually rather difficult in Gamesalad with it's lack of a snap to grid feature, if you're going to add individual tiles into your game like what mario games do, then I'd suggest using Tiled, which is a very useful map designer which is very similar to that of Gamemaker's way of using tiles. Here's a link to it

MarkOnTheIron

@P-O-M Are you using the tile option on the actor attributes or are you just aligning the images side by side? Because on the first case I don't have any issue on iOS devices only on Macs.

POM

@P-O-M Are you using the tile option on the actor attributes or are you just aligning the images side by side? Because on the first case I don't have any issue on iOS devices only on Macs.

Tile option, with the "width and height" set to the width and height of the bg image (480x320)
I would love to see a tiled image project with no black lines, if you have a quick example please post here cause this drives me crazy.

Thanks Mark!

Roy.

MarkOnTheIron

The last game I developed, "Deluxe Track&Field", is using tiles extensively for the ground, tracks, banners and other things. I even have an animated tiled actor for the crowd. No black lines.

If you want to check them here are the links for the lite versions:
http://itunes.apple.com/it/app/deluxe-track-field-lite/id542335471?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/it/app/deluxe-track-field-hd-lite/id542338825?mt=8


One thing that comes into mind for your problem is that maybe you have a slightly transparent lines of pixels in the image border. That may happens sometimes when resizing images even in Photoshop.

POM

The last game I developed, "Deluxe Track&Field", is using tiles extensively for the ground, tracks, banners and other things. I even have an animated tiled actor for the crowd. No black lines.

If you want to check them here are the links for the lite versions:
http://itunes.apple.com/it/app/deluxe-track-field-lite/id542335471?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/it/app/deluxe-track-field-hd-lite/id542338825?mt=8


One thing that comes into mind for your problem is that maybe you have a slightly transparent lines of pixels in the image border. That may happens sometimes when resizing images even in Photoshop.

Will check those games asap
The images dont have transparent lines, ive checked that.

Please see this :
http://www.mediafire.com/?tbnccbr1h1hmaz9
Dont you see the tile issue?

Roy.

Hymloe

@P-O-M

I checked out your simple test project. I see what you mean. The line appears while the camera is interpolating from one position to another (using the scene.Camera.Origin.X attribute).

It doesn't seem to happen if I just use a Timer and increment scene.Camera.Origin.X by a certain number each frame.

Seems to be a bug in Game Salad. [@SaladStraightShooter] I'd implore Game Salad to download that file and work on fixing the bug based on your simple example.

There may be other problems relating to tiling, but at least fixing that one case might result in the overall problem being found and fixed.

Socks

@P-O-M

Unfortunately mate, this problem occurs on any device . . .

Yep, I've run into the same issue - these visible joins between tiles appear on the iPad, iPhone and iPods I've tested.

. . . I've contact GS about this few time and they did not even reply to me.. makes you wonder if you send all those bug reports in vain ..

I made the same point recently, once you've sent in a few bug reports, taken the time to measure, test and report these bugs (with example projects and a clear description of when they occur) and you do all this through the official channels . . . and all you hear is . . . . silence . . . nothing, zero, zilch . . . you send it all off again a few weeks later . . .same deal . . . silence . . . nothing . . . and the bugs and glitches remain in place month after month, version after version, year after year, you tend to give up on the bug reporting system, like you say you wonder whether there is any point reporting this stuff, it certainly feels very similar to 'wasting your own time'.

I gave up reporting bugs a long time ago.

Hymloe

I've taken the time to report about 10 bugs that really bother me, that are crippling my use of Game Salad.

I've never heard anything back, but I don't really expect to.

But I've also seen several versions come out that do not address the bugs. That bothers me.

Game Salad is a good application, and it's accessible to beginners, and offers some more advanced functionality. But development and improvements are rather slow.

Socks

One thing that comes into mind for your problem is that maybe you have a slightly transparent lines of pixels in the image border. That may happens sometimes when resizing images even in Photoshop

Yes, resizing in Photoshop can throw up these semi-transparent boarders when the image you are resizing is layered (i.e.: not flattened).

You can fix these boarders by simply copying the file over itself in Photoshop a few times, so you have several layers of the same image, flatten them all and the semi-tranparent boarder (usually just a pixel wide) is killed off.


. . . . but, this problem (the lines between tiles) is not related to this Photoshop issue, it happens with all images regardless of any transparency issues.

Hymloe

In the sample project uploaded by @P-O-M there is not tiling seam until the camera actually moves. So it doesn't seem to be caused by a semi-transparent seam in the texture.

I had the seams happening in my level layouts, and visible even in the editor, but that was because my instances in the scene were just some random length, like 1742.7.

So I made them multiples of 256 (the size of my actual texture), and that fixed that tiling issue for me. So I'm happy.

But check out the sample project by P-O-M. Not sure why his problem is happening. Just seems like a Game Salad bug...?

mrpacogp

I can confirm it @Hymloe.
I have a background and using a lowers values like 256 the line between tiles disappears!

Socks

I've taken the time to report about 10 bugs that really bother me, that are crippling my use of Game Salad.

But I've also seen several versions come out that do not address the bugs. That bothers me

Yep! I've got a couple of projects that have ground to a halt for almost two years now because of specific bugs, not being a programmer myself I can't honesty say whether they are easy to fix or not, but it is a concern that new features and monetization schemes are announced with each release while the core program remains littered with bugs, interface problems and functionality issues that never get addressed.

I was blissfully unaware of this tiling issue until recently, it effectively means you can't tile an image in GameSalad if used with a moving camera from what I can see.

MarkOnTheIron

I was blissfully unaware of this tiling issue until recently, it effectively means you can't tile an image in GameSalad if used with a moving camera from what I can see.

Not really. Apparently it's more a tile or image size issue. I posted above a couple of iOS games that use a lot of tiles AND a moving camera. No issues.

In some scenes I use 284x100, 64x200, 512x60, 256x128 (this one is even animated) and 64x64 tiles at the same time.

Socks

. . . Apparently it's more a tile or image size issue.

The image tile problem is more of a tile problem ?



Not sure what you are saying, but regardless of tile size / aspect ratio the problem persists, on iOS devices as well as in GameSalad creator itself, changing tile size (the actual file as well as 'tile width / height') doesn't seem to solve the problem.

I've tried everything, there doesn't seem to be a solution (or at least I've not discovered one yet).

Could I look at one of your projects where you have used tiles without getting this issue ?

POM

I was blissfully unaware of this tiling issue until recently, it effectively means you can't tile an image in GameSalad if used with a moving camera from what I can see.

Not really. Apparently it's more a tile or image size issue. I posted above a couple of iOS games that use a lot of tiles AND a moving camera. No issues.

In some scenes I use 284x100, 64x200, 512x60, 256x128 (this one is even animated) and 64x64 tiles at the same time.

Well I've played the game (nice game by the way!)
And I haven't seen any tile issues, so either you did some workarounds or maybe you published the game with a certain GS creator version that didn't had this issue?!

Anyway, the issue exist and you can simply see it on the file I posted..
And its been here for quite a while now.

Roy.