Question

Is there any Cocoa control that is capable of drawing tile maps with multiple layers and multiple texture sources which can also intercept touches into single tiles? Having multiple layer support is not a real requirement but an optional feature (the views could still be stacked). Hardware acceleration is not needed at all.

So far I have toyed around with NSMatrix, IKImageBrowser and NSCollectionView but non of them felt like a good solution for the problem. Ideally I need an control similar to the one in Tiled.app. Is there anything, third party or built-in, or do I have to handcraft this control?

Answer 1

I fear that you will be hardly able to find a ready-to-use control for managing tile maps.

If I had to implement something like that on my own, I would consider using CATiledLayer, since this is the closest thing to a tile map control that I know of.

From CATiledLayer Reference:

CATiledLayer is a subclass of CALayer providing a way to asynchronously provide tiles of the layer’s content, potentially cached at multiple levels of detail.

There is a nice sample by Bill Dudney (the author of “Core Animation for MacOS and the iPhone”). This sample could provide you a solid foundation for your own project, though it only displays one single PDF, allowing you to zoom in the area you clicked on (this requires rereading the tile at a different detail level).

Another interesting introduction can be found here. This is more step-by-step, so you might start with this.

Finally, on Cocoa is my Girlfriend there is a nice article, although it focuses on iOS, but you may find it anyway relevant.