There are plenty of reasons for a tileset program. I'll get to some of them later. The question we should be asking is, "Who is going to make this program?" If you or someone you know has cracked the .j2t file format, please share the details. I'll help with the program if this is the case.

Anyway, reasons (or should I say features) for a tileset program:

It could implement a basic mapping feature that allows you to build sample maps with your tileset as you create it. This would be great for testing usability, paralaxing, and to get a general idea of the overall feel of your tileset without having to optimize/compile it.

It could have support for drag and drop between different tilesets to make rearranging and merging tilesets easier.

It could show several in-game sprites to allow you to quickly see the results of changing the reserved color entries.

It could include a superset of base tiles to be used or modified for use in any tileset (signs, destruct scenery, triggers, ropes, etc.).

It could store tilesets in an intermediate format that allows a background/forground structure for each tile. This way, different "indoor" backgrounds could be applied to groups of tiles quickly and easily.

It could implement palette morphing code to automatically suggest palettes for night, winter, etc. variations of tilesets. I.e. Darkening all tiles, fading to reds and yellows, etc.

It could provide countless features to make the whole masking process easier. For one thing, it could support using vector shape tools to define masks and convert them to bitmaps upon compilation.

More.

Again, this is going to require that someone aquire the file formats from Arjan. I requested them once, and he said the tileset files are a mess with pointers to pointers to pointers. They had to make them ugly in order to get the file sizes down.

Uhh, the end. I guess.

-Nag