Wang tiling

[arachni]

Has anyone worked with Wang tiles before? If so, what has been your experience?

For those of you who aren't familiar with them, it's basically one solution to the problem of repetitive patterns when you use one tile to make something like grass.

Spoiler

A tile from a grass pattern I threw together using Photoshop. Ignore the edges of the water autotile -- I know they don't match. I'll work on that later if I decide I want to use this grass pattern.

I did a little searching and found this paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cohen/wangfinal.pdf

I implemented a small program in VB.NET that would allow me, through the Windows Clipboard, lay out boards with Wang tiles in RPG Maker XP. (*If there is a different practical way to change tiles on the board programmatically during the editing process, I missed it -- let me know. The data on the clipboard is actually pretty straightforward.) I made some sets of tiles -- 8, 12, and 18 -- in Photoshop. The results have artifacts, some of which I could make less obvious by editing the tiles, but I found them more pleasing than just using 1 tile.

Spoiler

8 tiles:

12 tiles:

18 tiles:

The paper mentions generating tile sets automatically from source images -- does anyone know of any programs that do that?

Also, does anyone has any interest in putting this to use? I can share the program I made to put tiles into boards in RPG XP, but I would need to clean up the interface if anyone besides me is going to use it.

 

[mawk]

I'm not familiar with the term Wang, but I think I understand from the context what the function is.

that looks very nice, actually. I'd often thought that a lot of things just can't be done by filling an area using a single tile; it's nice to see someone's been doing something ambitious in that direction.