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Adding Tiles to a Tileset

This guide covers adding new 32×32 tiles to an existing netPanzer .tls tileset file (e.g. summer12mb.tls).

Prerequisites

  • GIMP (any recent version)
  • Python 3 with Pillow and numpy: pip install Pillow numpy

Step 1 — Draw the tile in GIMP

  1. File → New… — set size to 32 × 32 pixels.
  2. Draw your tile using colours that match the surrounding tileset tiles. You do not need to worry about palette management — the script handles colour quantization automatically.

Step 2 — Export as PNG

File → Export As…, save as a .png file. Leave all export options at their defaults and click Export.

The file can be RGB, RGBA, or palette-indexed — all modes are accepted.

Step 3 — Append the tile to the tileset

python3 tools/add_tile.py \
    --tls /path/to/summer12mb.tls \
    --tile mytile.png

The script:

  • Quantizes the image to the colours used by the tileset, using the same netp.act palette that the editor and game use for rendering.
  • Backs up the original .tls as .tls.bak before making any changes.
  • Inserts a 3-byte tile header and appends 1024 bytes of pixel data.
  • Prints the new tile's ID — use this ID in the tile browser or a stamp JSON.

Use --dry-run to preview without writing:

python3 tools/add_tile.py --tls summer12mb.tls --tile mytile.png --dry-run

Options

Flag Default Meaning
--attrib 0 0 0 = normal, 1 = impassable (walls, deep water)
--move-value 0 0 Movement cost hint used by the netPanzer engine

Replacing an existing tile

To overwrite a tile at a specific ID without changing the tile count:

python3 tools/replace_tile.py \
    --tls /path/to/summer12mb.tls \
    --id 9467 \
    --tile newtile.png

The same quantization and backup logic applies.

Regenerating the river-to-water transition tiles

tools/gen_river_water_transitions.py is a summer12mb-specific script that generates blended transition tiles between the river edge tiles (IDs 9467–9469) and the deep-water tiles (IDs 10967–10969), and appends them to every variant of the tileset.

python3 tools/gen_river_water_transitions.py \
    --wads /path/to/netpanzer/data/wads

This produces three new tiles per variant (IDs 11961–11963 for most variants, 11960–11962 for Desert). Run it again after any upstream change to the source river or water tiles; it will strip and replace the previous transition tiles automatically.

Notes on the .tls format

Each tile is stored as 1024 bytes of palette indices (32 × 32, row-major, top-left to bottom-right). The netp.act file (ships with netPanzer, found in data/wads/) contains the 256-colour palette used for rendering.

See docs/map-format.md for a full description of the .tls binary layout.