tiled

Tiled Map Editor - https://www.mapeditor.org/

About Tiled

Tiled is a general purpose tile map editor for all tile-based games, such as RPGs, platformers or Breakout clones.

Tiled is highly flexible. It can be used to create maps of any size, with no restrictions on tile size, or the number of layers or tiles that can be used. Maps, layers, tiles, and objects can all be assigned arbitrary properties. Tiled's map format (TMX) is easy to understand and allows multiple tilesets to be used in any map. Tilesets can be modified at any time.

Installing Tiled

Tiled is available for all major operating systems and can be downloaded either from GitHub Releases or from itch.io. Most Linux distributions also package Tiled, but these packages are usually out of date so you might prefer to use the AppImage or install Tiled through Flatpak or snap, both of which are official releases.

Signed Releases for macOS and Windows

macOS builds are signed by the maintainer, Thorbjørn Lindeijer, who registered as Apple Developer.

Windows installers are using free code signing provided by SignPath.io, and a free code signing certificate by the SignPath Foundation.

Compiling Tiled

Before you can compile Tiled, you must ensure the Qt (>= 5.12) development libraries have been installed as well as the Qbs build tool:

On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install qtbase5-dev libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev-tools zlib1g-dev qtdeclarative5-dev qbs
On Fedora: sudo dnf builddep tiled
On Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S qt qt5-tools qbs
On macOS with Homebrew:
- brew install qbs (which automatically pulls in qt)

If you want to build the Python plugin, you additionally need to install the Python 3 development libraries:

On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install python3-dev
On Windows: https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/

Alternatively, you can download Qt here. You will still need to install a development environment alongside and some libraries depending on your system, for example:

On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install build-essential zlib1g-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
On Windows: Choose "MinGW" Qt version, or install Visual Studio
On macOS: Install Xcode

The easiest way to compile and run Tiled is to open tiled.qbs in Qt Creator and run the project from there.

From the command-line, you may need to set up Qbs before you can build Tiled (you will also need to make sure the version of Qt you want to use is in your path):

qbs setup-toolchains --detect     # setup toolchains
qbs setup-qt --detect             # setup Qt (not needed since Qbs 1.13)
qbs                               # build Tiled

You can now run Tiled as follows:

qbs run -p tiled

Qt 6

For compiling libtiledquick (not built by default) you'll need to install the Vulkan headers:

On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install libvulkan-dev

Working with Visual Studio 2017

Once Qbs is set up (see previous instructions), it is possible to generate a Visual Studio 2017 project with it that allows you to code, compile and run using that IDE. This can be done with the following command:

qbs generate -g visualstudio2017

Installing Self-Compiled Tiled

To install Tiled, run qbs install from the terminal. By default, Tiled will be installed to <build-dir>/install-root.

The installation prefix can be changed when building Tiled. For example, to use an installation prefix of /usr:

qbs qbs.installPrefix:"/usr"

To install Tiled to a packaging directory:

qbs install --install-root /tmp/tiled-pkg

By default, Tiled and its plugins are compiled with an Rpath that allows them to find the shared libtiled library immediately after being compiled. When packaging Tiled for distribution, the Rpath should be disabled by appending projects.Tiled.useRPaths:false to the qbs command.