For Terrains, a more visually-friendly, more detailed, zoomable grid view

[gvivster]

There are two things I use constantly in Tiled:

• Expanded RPGMaker tilesets, which, although they are are a non-ideal experience visually, are a necessary step to be able to use RPGMaker layouts within Tiled.
• Terrain sets, which - although they reduce the pain point of using expanded tilesets - are also difficult visually. Even with preview tiles selected, I can only see a skinny column of one tiny tile each.

(This leaves me desperately wishing to simply be able to use RPGMaker's tileset layouts within Tiled because of their clean straightforward view of all of the tileset's contents, but I know would take MAJOR refactoring you probably don't want to do - so here's an alternative.)

At the end of the day, what I really want is simply to be able to LOOK at my terrains in the sidebar and SEE a nice clean representation of each one, no matter what specific tiles are actually getting used. I just want to be able to simply and cleanly see all the relevant previews at once in the entire set, like you can in RPGMaker.

If it was a zoomable grid view, that would probably be perfect. (thank you to eishiya for mentioning that!)

(This is a little bit of an accessibility ask for me, as I have a condition that sometimes affects my visual working memory - basically, if I can only see a tiny part of a long list of graphics at once, it's incredibly hard for me to keep them straight and work with them. This change would have a direct positive impact on me every single time I use Tiled.)

[eishiya]

When I mentioned this on Discord, I just meant being able to see a zoomable grid of the existing previews, e.g.

But from your text, it sounds like you want every single tile with that terrain displayed? That would be quite messy, especially considering that it's common for tiles to contain multiple terrains, and since most terrains contain many tiles. For that sort of view, #3288 would be better, as it would let you customise things as you like, instead of forcing Tiled to make decisions about which tiles to display and the arrangement to display them in.

[gvivster]

@eishiya Edited. Yeah, a single tile preview is probably fine, especially if I can zoom it.

[eishiya]

You removed the part about viewing multiple terrain sets at a time, but I imagine that part's pretty important for you, since it sounds like you have a lot of tilesets and therefore a lot of terrain sets. My mockup above just shows one terrain set's terrains and otherwise works exactly like the current Terrains list, you'd still have to click through different terrain sets to view their terrains.

My mockup has the benefit of being relatively simple to implement since it's an alternate view of the exact same data and structure Tiled already has, but a way to view terrains from many terrain sets at once sounds interesting too. If it's too much work, then hopefully the scratch pad panel can still work for that, and since that one covers many other scenarios and has been discussed for a while, it's probably more likely to be implemented.

[bjorn]

A zoomable grid view would indeed be nice for the terrains (thanks @eishiya for the mockup!). One thing to keep in mind is that the same UI is used in the Tileset Editor, so I think we'll need to keep the list view on a toggle, since only the list view provides a means of renaming the terrains (unless we show them also in the grid view, but I think this is undesirable).

I agree that it would be great if the scratch pad would also provide a way to select terrains, thanks for bringing that up!

[eishiya]

It should definitely be a toggle. I personally rely on names more than previews due to the nature of my Terrains, so I would not use this visual view.

Something I forgot to include in my mockup is that in the zoomable view, the Terrain names should be visible as tooltips.