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Animated tiles

Tiled's animated tiles work in a PSDK project, under constraints inherited from the RPG Maker XP format the conversion targets: frames must share one tileset, durations are quantised to a fixed step, and each map has a hard budget of distinct animated tiles. This page covers building an animated tile and staying inside that budget.

Build an animated tile​

An animation is defined in the tileset, not in the map. Every frame is a tile of that same .tsx, so a tile animated across two tilesets is not possible: put all the frames on one sheet.

The demo ships a reference, TECH-Animations.tsx, used by several maps including 006 Beach.tmx. Opening it shows how frames are laid out on the sheet before being tied together.

Declaring an animation frame by frame in Tiled's animation editor gets tedious quickly. The Bulk Animations plugin automates it across a whole tileset. If you use it, remember to credit its authors in your game.

Frame durations​

Durations are set in milliseconds in Tiled, but the conversion rounds them to a step of 100 milliseconds. Two consequences follow:

  • A duration is truncated down to the step. 250 ms becomes 200 ms, not 300.
  • Any duration below the step is raised to one step. 40 ms plays at 100 ms.

Using multiples of 100 ms therefore means the animation plays at the speed you designed, rather than at whatever the truncation leaves. That step is not a property of the format: it follows the project's display settings, so a project that changes them gets a different step.

Nothing in the conversion rejects a long animation, but every frame adds a row to the generated texture, and the practical maximum is 32 frames: 32 frames of 32 pixels is the 1024 pixel texture ceiling the whole conversion is built around. Sticking to 4, 8, 16 or 32 frames is the recommended shape.

The budget of distinct animated tiles​

RPG Maker XP offers seven autotile slots. The conversion packs 32 animated tiles into each, so that the generated texture stays within 1024 pixels for weaker machines. That gives a hard ceiling of 224 distinct animated tiles per map. Past it, that map fails to convert while the others go through, and the compilation output shows:

Failed to process <map_name>: [RMXP ERROR] This map has too many animated diverse tiles (256)

The number in brackets is what the map actually consumed. This message does not appear in Studio: unlike the checks that reject a file the moment Studio reads it, this limit is only hit later, on the engine side. The map stays in the conversion queue and is retried on the next run.

The count is not a simple total. Animated tiles are grouped by number of frames, and each group is rounded up to a multiple of 32. A map using 33 tiles of 4 frames and 2 tiles of 8 frames spends 64 plus 32, so 96 of its 224, not 35. Keeping animations to a small number of frame counts costs far less budget than spreading them across many.

The rule of three​

A converted map has exactly three tile layers, because that is all RPG Maker XP offers. When more than three tiles stack on one position, the conversion merges them into composite tiles. A composite tile containing an animated tile is itself a new distinct animated tile, and it eats budget that nothing on screen justifies.

The practical rule: at a position carrying an animated tile, keep at most three superposed tiles. In other words, only map what is visible. Tiles hidden under an opaque layer cost budget and show nothing.

Stacking two animated tiles on one position is the case the merge handles best: the composite counts as a single animated tile. It only works cleanly if both have the same frame count. If they do not, the shorter one is drawn over its own frames and disappears for the rest of the cycle, and only one of the two timings survives for the whole column.

Conclusion​

  • All the frames of an animation live on the same tileset, and the animation is declared there rather than on the map.
  • Durations are truncated to a 100 millisecond step by default, and anything shorter is raised to one step.
  • A map may hold 224 distinct animated tiles, counted by frame-count groups rounded up to multiples of 32.
  • More than three superposed tiles on one position makes the conversion merge them, which creates extra animated tiles.
  • TECH-Animations.tsx and 006 Beach.tmx are the working references to open.