I've come up with a cool tile system where I take a large seamless texture and split it up into 64x64 chunks to make the tiles. When painting the texture, it works out which frame to use on each tile so that you can intermix tiles of different kinds and each region of the same tile will always be seamless. It's a bit difficult to explain so here are some screenshots to show what I mean.

http://www.shattered-design.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=116

The trouble I'm having, is how to make the transitions between tiles of different kinds. I undertand the standard way to do it is to make transition tiles for each direction, but as each kind of tile has several possibilities it would mean making a transition set for each unique tile and that is prohibitively excessive. If the seamless texture is 512x512, and the tile size is 64x64 that's 64 tiles per texture type. As the transition from one texture to another can occur at any point in the texture, that is 64*several extra tiles per texture and will use a lot of vram. I'm not married to this system so would consider alternatives, but I wanted the regions of the same kind of tile not to be so repetative.

I'm making this in BlitzMax but general ideas would be helpful.

Any suggestions welcome.

You could use alpha-blending to smoothly transition between two different images. An alpha-mask image can make the transition prettier. For example for a transition between a grass tile and a rock tile, you can use a gray-scale mask where white areas are rock, black areas are grass, and 50% gray is halfways blended between rock and grass. That way you can blend several different grass tiles with different rock tiles using the same transition mask.

You could use alpha-blending to smoothly transition between two different images. An alpha-mask image can make the transition prettier. For example for a transition between a grass tile and a rock tile, you can use a gray-scale mask where white areas are rock, black areas are grass, and 50% gray is halfways blended between rock and grass. That way you can blend several different grass tiles with different rock tiles using the same transition mask.

Cool thanks! But I don't suppose you know how to do this in BlitzMax? I will try asking on its forums.