I was always under the impression this program was a level editor made primarily for use with for the author's Clean Game Library [1], a game engine for a functional programming language named Clean [2]. I haven't used either, but maybe people into functional programming will be interested in studying a working game engine made in a functional programming language back in 1999? [3]
As for interesting features the program offers on its own… it has a pretty decent integrated graphic editor for tilemaps [4], and uses a template language for defining the output format instead of providing a generic parsable file format [5]. It also appears to abstract away layers by making each tile in your map consist of a "front," "middle," and "back" tile [6]. In general, it seems like a more old-school version of Tiled, and may be useful for people developing for/on older systems that want a very lightweight tilemap editor.
For people used to programs like Tiled, though, there's probably no compelling reason to switch to this tool. The lack of a working undo function in the map editor could be a dealbreaker, for one.
Yea my first thought was "is this any better/worse than Tiled?" If you are a Unity user you should also check out Tiled 2 Unity: http://www.seanba.com/tiled2unity
This might be the perfect application of Inkscape. As programmer, you can edit XML model and add data to your objects. You can also write Python plugins to integrate into your asset pipeline.
I used it to draw art which was converted to bitmaps, define polygon shapes for Box2D bodies, define joints between shapes (rope/spring/hinge), select static/dynamic properties, assign mass/restitution/friction...
I use Tile Studio as my only sprite and map editor for 2D platformer development (first in C, then C++, now Lua/Love). The ability to define my own output format instead of having to deal with somebody else's XML is a killer feature for me - a primary reason I've previously tried and discarded Tiled.
You can define your own output format? Hot damn, I'm sold. It took a long time to get Tiled parsed, especially since I needed additional features it didn't have.
And that was years ago, so I wasn't looking forward to going through that process again.
I wish more software in general allowed you to freely define your output format.
I think that one could possible evolve from http://www.piskelapp.com/ in near future; piskel already has a simple "Seamless drawing mode" option and developer seems to be open for ideas.
There's a guy who remade pokemon (yellow) in the browser and also a tile editor for it I forget who but it was pretty slick. I think he was a designer.
PyxelEdit is really good for creating graphics (sprites and spritesheets). It's so simple and intuitive, makes it easy to focus on art and stay creative. It can be used for making maps, but it's hard to compete with TilEd, which supports hex maps, vector zones for triggers and other meta-data.
It boggles me that a project hosted on SourceForge that hasn't been updated in 3 years and is in no way relevant lands on the front page of Hacker News...
This is of great interest to me, because I have been meaning to do a small project with Lazarus, and this open source project is written in Delphi, so it may be a viable contender for the lab-bench project I'd been planning ..
As for interesting features the program offers on its own… it has a pretty decent integrated graphic editor for tilemaps [4], and uses a template language for defining the output format instead of providing a generic parsable file format [5]. It also appears to abstract away layers by making each tile in your map consist of a "front," "middle," and "back" tile [6]. In general, it seems like a more old-school version of Tiled, and may be useful for people developing for/on older systems that want a very lightweight tilemap editor.
For people used to programs like Tiled, though, there's probably no compelling reason to switch to this tool. The lack of a working undo function in the map editor could be a dealbreaker, for one.
[1] http://cleangl.sourceforge.net/index.php
[2] http://clean.cs.ru.nl/Clean
[3] http://cleangl.sourceforge.net/thesis/
[4] http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/drawing.html
[5] http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/tutor.html#CreateTSD
[6] http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/tutor.html#MapEditor