I ran into a small problem while working on my game. I needed my server to load the .tmx files from Tiled Map Editor so I could do server-sided collision detection. I planned on using TiledLib for my server project, but TiledLib seemed to only work with XNA and not just plain C#. TiledLib’s map object needed me to load from XNA’s content pipeline. I have no idea how to allow my server project to use the content pipeline.

Since TiledLib didn’t work, I had to roll out my own parser. Luckily Tiled has a setting to export as XML and not encoded Base64.

Here’s my solution:

        private void LoadMapFile(string fileName)
        {

            XmlDocument mapfile = new XmlDocument();
            mapfile.Load("data/maps/" + fileName);

            XmlNode mapNode = mapfile.GetElementsByTagName("map")[0];
            width = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["width"].Value);
            height = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["height"].Value);
            tileWidth = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["tilewidth"].Value);
            tileHeight = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["tileheight"].Value);

            XmlNodeList layerNodes = mapfile.GetElementsByTagName("layer");
            foreach (XmlNode layerNode in layerNodes)
            {
                TiledLayer tileLayer = new TiledLayer(layerNode.Attributes["name"].Value, int.Parse(layerNode.Attributes["width"].Value), int.Parse(layerNode.Attributes["height"].Value));
                foreach (XmlNode dataNode in layerNode.ChildNodes)
                {
                    int row = 0;
                    int col = 0;
                    foreach (XmlNode tileNode in dataNode.ChildNodes)
                    {
                        Tile newTile = new Tile(int.Parse(tileNode.Attributes["gid"].Value),row,col);
                        tileLayer.Data[row, col] = newTile;

                        if (col < tileLayer.Width - 1)
                            col++;
                        else
                        {
                            col = 0;

                            if (row < tileLayer.Height - 1)
                                row++;
                        }
                    }
                }
                layers.Add(tileLayer.Name, tileLayer);
                tileLayer.Print();
            }
        }

This only parses the basic's of the Tiled map; map size, layers, tiles. I'll eventually add in properties.