#tilemaps

[coyotebastard]

Absolutely hooked on #tilemaps It is such a nice workflow working with 8x8 pixels. The pixels themselves really can lend a ton of detail. Browse #pixelart It's a treat for the eyes! ---------- #gamedevelopment #art #doodle #unity #unity2d #unity3d #indiegamedevelopment #indiegames #cats #anthro #anthroart #color #pico8 #retrogaming https://www.instagram.com/p/B_X-LTFFcyU/?igshid=1haj3tvz3du7f

[dfilitto]

Tilesets e Tilemaps na Unity

Se você já se perguntou como clássicos como The Legend of Zelda ou sucessos modernos como Stardew Valley e Celeste constroem mundos vastos e detalhados sem sobrecarregar o hardware, a resposta está em uma palavra: Modularidade. Para quem está começando na Unity, entender a diferença entre Tileset e Tilemap é o primeiro passo para sair do amadorismo e entrar no fluxo de trabalho profissional.…

Tilesets e Tilemaps na Unity

[beeboileon]

TILEMAP COMPLETED

This is my completed tile map. It includes a dragon statue that I will expand on once I figure out cutscenes. For now you just walk past it.

[beeboileon]

TILE MAPS

Here are three tile maps. Donkey Kong, Mega Man and Super Mario. Super Mario reuses certain assets like the bush to create the clouds. This saves a lot of time because you can just copy and paste and re color.

[whyat1872]

Overhead battle map quick build. Used a map from the upcoming #wargroove as a reference. #srpg #tactics #tilemaps #sprites #battle #nes #gamedesign #pixelenvironment #pixelart https://www.instagram.com/p/BsNIAAAF4GC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1wb9cwugx2xiz

[paulbradshaw]

(via Election hex mapping | ODI Leeds)

One of the problems is that the cities expand. Keeping their border constituencies together can be quite tricky. Sometimes there aren't enough rural constituencies to fill in gaps in the grid. In doing the job we've tried to keep the end result looking vaguely like the country as that helps people find constituencies they are interested in. So, we've tried to keep the main regions together as distinct groups e.g. we didn't want "islands" of the West Midlands stuck in the middle of the East Midlands. The main regions border each other in a similar way to how they do geographically e.g. High Peak (East Midlands) sits between Yorkshire & Humber and the West Midlands.

[paulbradshaw]

(via The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization: The Guardian puts flow charts on a map)

[stealthcoder]

Tilemap drawing and edition in Unity

On several projects (either prototypes at work or side projects) I’ve needed to implement tile maps. For example, this is a subset of a map I did for a project built on a different language that I’ve reused for a Unity implementation.

One drawback of Unity for 2D games is that it does not offer any specific built-in functionality to efficiently draw them or edit them. I'm aware that there are several editors on the Asset Store already taking care of that, and a quick look at their roadmap shows that they’re already working on built-in tilemap support. Until that feature is implemented, it’s up to us. So far I’ve tried several approaches myself.

DRAWING

Of course, the obvious one: One GameObject with a SpriteRenderer attached per tile. Just out of intuition, this approach already looks like a massive no-no. Even if in terms of graphics Unity might batch the calls per tile onto a single draw call, we’re spawning a lot of objects for the map alone, which might add some overhead, and since the map is more or less static we wouldn’t improve much by using pools. I have to say that I’ve used this approach a couple of times for very small maps where I know the total number of objects will remain small and relatively constant, but I know that there are way better alternatives. Therefore, I started thinking on how I could draw the whole map using a single GameObject.

A single GameObject with MeshRenderer/MeshFilter components and we create a custom mesh: Basically, we create a grid of vertices, uv coordinates and so on. The main problem I found was that for relatively large maps (around 300x300) the mesh hits Unity’s vertex limit, so in those cases we should have to split and create more than one of these. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, as it’s probably better to stick to smaller maps anyway (and then apply buffering techniques to switch quickly between maps, or handle map transitions). For the curious, here’s a gist of a MonoBehaviour script that generates a layered tilemap as a set of meshes. The map file is a Tiled map exported as xml to avoid extra code to handle compression, csv or base64 stuff (I left that for a more general solution). I also set the texture directly on the MonoBehaviour so that I didn’t have to process extra tileset information from the file, which would be a more general, correct approach.

https://gist.github.com/wildrabbit/47502d62ef329fe6bb52

A single GameObject with a SpriteRenderer that draws a custom texture. This is the approach I’m currently using. We provide a list with the sprites to render and we draw the texture manually by blitting pixel areas on it. This is probably a bit CPU intensive while we’re building the map, but for static maps it could work.

Below follows another example:

https://gist.github.com/wildrabbit/b243f043e485f970e43e

As in (2), we create a single GameObject and draw a custom mesh, but in this case it only draws one quad. The map rendering is handled by the pixel shader. It was cool to pull off, but it was tricky. I'll probably share this in a separate post, to explain how it works. To summarize, we create an auxiliary texture to represent the map where the red component of each pixel corresponds to a normalized index on the tileset, and then the fragment shader performs a set of calculations to resolve the texture coordinates from the tileset and the corresponding fragment colour.

ABOUT EDITING

Another key point, unless you take the procedural route, is authoring maps. Even if you're using the "one object per tile" approach stated before, creating a map by manually dragging prefabs onto the scene is a major PITA as the map grows larger. One of the first questions I had was... should I use Unity at all?. For example, in the past I’ve used Tiled (URL) for projects using Actionscript3 or Haxe (Haxeflixel in particular provides add-ons that can handle *.TMX maps with little extra work, and Actionscript3 made processing XML files quite straightforward) and it's easy to use and powerful. Creating a parser and reading those files in Unity is also doable (The example from (2) actually does that), and at some point I thought about creating a tool to export tmx maps into a set of Unity scriptable objects. In any case, I felt that using two different editors was a bit too much. For that reason, on the puzzle game I’m currently working on, I’ve created a set of tools that allow me to edit levels directly on the scene view, plus a combination of custom inspector windows. It’s still rough and there are some areas for improvement, but I’m reasonably happy with the overall structure. I'll share some specifics at a later time.