Making Tiles

Tile making basics

You can totally make your own tiles. Tactic tiles are represented as Python classes. If you don’t know what that means, it probably doesn’t matter; you should be able to do quite a lot understanding just a smattering of python. (If you want the full story, you can look at the page on Tile Structure.)

At it’s very simplest, you can think of a tile as a some lines of Python ending return statement, that returns some html. That’s a tile’s primary job: to return some html to be displayed on the front of the tile. So this code

return "<b>Hello World</b>"

would display “Hello World” on the front of the tile in bold. More generally, creating a tile requires defining the following elements, most of which are optional.

The render_content method

Every tile must define the code for the render_content. This must end in a return statement, which returns a string containing html or a list of widgets as explained. This is the code that will be run when the user runs the tile.

Tile options

These are the options that the user will see when they click on the gear symbol at top of a tile.

Exports

These are tile attributes that are made available to other tiles via pipes, and to the exports viewer. So if you write self.my_attribute in your render_content code, and then list my_attribute as an export, then this value will be available via a pipe.

Additional methods

As you’ll see in the The Tile Creator documentation, you can define additional methods for your tile class. Partly, this is just a convenience; it’s a way to keep your render_content code from becoming too cluttered. But this is also where you’ll defined any special Handler Methods.

Globals

You can provide code to executed in the global namespace.

Metadata

Finally, you can attach metadata to your tile. This includes the same tags and notes you can attach to any resource. But it also includes a field that is specific to tiles called Category. This bit of metadata is what determines which tile menu your tile will appear on in the Main interface.

About the tile making tools

In the olden days, the only tool that we had available was the The Module Viewer. It presents a tile, in its raw form, as a python class. If you’re an accomplished python programmer, and comfortable with python classes, then you might want to use this editor. In addition, even if you aren’t comfortable with python classes, you might have to use the Module Viewer to fix a tile that has somehow gotten into a bad state, possibly because it has been garbled by the second editor, which I will describe in the next paragraph.

Now, in our modern era, we have available to us the The Tile Creator. It’s designed to provide a much more scaffolding for the construction of tiles. At this point, I pretty much only use the Tile Creator. So do not feel ashamed if you choose this path.

Warning

If you do anything tricky in a tile created in the module viewer, there’s a chance it will be lost if you resave the tile from the Tile Creator.