Official 2D Tilemap Extras 2.0 released for Unity 2021.1

Hi,

I don't see a thread related to the 2D Tilemap Editor package so I'm asking here.

Is there any way to toggle the tilemap grid on and off? Right now, selecting the tilemap in the hierarchy view automatically toggles the scene view grid off but there is no way to act on the tilemap grid itself.

 

@ChuanXin

Hi!

Rule tiles are great tools, I really like them, even if I have troubles making them do what I want them to do!

But, they need room in the Inspector, we cannot scroll down beyond the last sprite in the list. And if the last sprite is actually a random list of sprites, the list is sometimes invisible and sometimes scrolling down below the list is possible. Random event.

This is in 2021.2. I also experienced troubles with the + button, the menu sometimes doesn't show although the button is active. I've seen myself clicking on that button dozen of times before "Add/Duplicate" shows up.

​

 

I'm using the latest version (2.0.0) in 2021.2. I'll try a quick reproduction and see about sharing it.

I have a request about the rule tiles: could you add a field that we could fill with a quantity of tiling rules so that they are created automatically, instead of having us click on + and Add each time? No need to remove the + button though, it could still have its uses.

 

Here it is: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ap1XqL-YTdfNgQxF0yjGJuFqZ1_J?e=yx8D62

It's a simple 2D project containing only one rule tile filled to the bottom so that you can see that scrolling down past the last rule is not possible. You shouldn't have troubles downloading it.

 

Yeah, it's a separate problem and I've had it...

So, when you download the project and open it in 2021.2, you can scroll past the last rule in the rule tile in Windows or is it because there is still room at the end of it and you need to add new ones until the space is filled?

I'm using Linux by the way.

 

Not possible.

I can see that you haven't understood my problem. I can also scroll down to the last rule but not past that last rule, there is no space under it to properly see the "Add/Duplicate" dialogue. I edited your image so that you can see what I mean by "scrolling down past the last rule". Sorry if my English is not good enough, it's not my mother tongue.

This is what I'd like to be able to do:

​

 

Exactly. At least, the space should be the size of the next, not created yet, rule. If you could do that.

 

Nice job! :clap: :clap: :clap:

Everything you added works:

1. filling the "Number of Tiling Rules" field does create the tiling rules,
2. dragging the sprites directly into the rule tile creates the tiling rules and fills them automatically,
3. there is now space under the last rule.

​

Now, I'm going to swap the packages in my project to see if the new rule tile applies correctly to already created rule tiles.

If people reading this are interested in trying the new version in a new project:

• download the zip from GIT,
• deinstall the 2D Tilemaps Extras from the package manager,
• extract the content of the archive in your Assets directory,
• done!

Thanks again @ChuanXin !

 

Pardon the super noob question, but why is this not availale in the LTS version?

 

Could not do that, I'll wait for the update then.

 

You can install the Preview Package.
Edit->Project Settings->Package Manager->Enable Preview Packages.
Now you can install it from the Package Manager

 

Not an issue for now, most of my rule tiles are done already and if I have more to do, I'll use the old system. I'll wait until you publish that new version for other projects.

 

Yes, but that's an older version. I was wondering why is the latest version not available.

 

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the right place for my question but there doesn't seem to exist a Tilemap thread.

I have seams on my tilemap, how do we fix that? And why do I have these seams? The only way that works for me right now is setting the x and y Grid cell size to 0.99. The other solutions do not work.

​

 

How would I go about creating a pseudo-random tile that doesn't repeat the same sprite as its neighbors?

I previously wrote some hacky solution to this by overriding GetTileData in a custom class that inherits from RuleTile, but I don't think this was correct, and it's currently not working for me. I'm on version 1.7.

I figured this page would be relevant, but it doesn't really explain how to get info from the tile or its neighbors (eg position, current sprite). And it doesn't explain the "neighbor" argument for RuleMatch.

 

Xorshift. Replace line in the RuleTile so it uses your own GetRandom(x, y) method. You could xorshift x and y independently then add, multiply them, throw in some primes - whatever you find gives you a good random distribution.

If I recall correctly, RuleTile uses PerlinNoise which really isn't a good choice for random distributions where neighbors aren't biased together.

I haven't looked at the latest RuleTile version but I doubt there's a good inheritance hook for it, so simply replace with your own method.

 

Interesting, thanks. Sorry, can you elaborate on how to use xorshift?

I tried to override GetTileData, and I replaced the Random case in the switch statement with this just to test it out:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. case TilingRule.OutputSprite.Random:
3.     float randomValue = Random.Range(0f, rule.m_Sprites.Length - 1);
4.     int index = Mathf.FloorToInt(randomValue);
5.     tileData.sprite = rule.m_Sprites[index];
6.     if (rule.m_RandomTransform != TilingRule.Transform.Fixed)
7.         transform = ApplyRandomTransform(rule.m_RandomTransform, transform, rule.m_PerlinScale, position);
8.     break;
9.  

The override works, so that's good. But the randomization is still placing neighbors beside each other.

For comparison, this was the original logic in the source code (you were right that it uses Perlin Noise).

Code (CSharp):

1.                        
2. case TilingRule.OutputSprite.Random:
3.     int index = Mathf.Clamp(Mathf.FloorToInt(GetPerlinValue(position, rule.m_PerlinScale, 100000f) * rule.m_Sprites.Length), 0, rule.m_Sprites.Length - 1f);
4.     tileData.sprite = rule.m_Sprites[index];
5.     if (rule.m_RandomTransform != TilingRule.Transform.Fixed)
6.         transform = ApplyRandomTransform(rule.m_RandomTransform, transform, rule.m_PerlinScale, position);
7.     break;

And this is GetPerlinValue, though I couldn't really tell you what it does or why you'd pass in 100000f.

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. /// <summary>
3. /// Returns a Perlin Noise value based on the given inputs.
4. /// </summary>
5. /// <param name="position">Position of the Tile on the Tilemap.</param>
6. /// <param name="scale">The Perlin Scale factor of the Tile.</param>
7. /// <param name="offset">Offset of the Tile on the Tilemap.</param>
8. /// <returns>A Perlin Noise value based on the given inputs.</returns>
9. public static float GetPerlinValue(Vector3Int position, float scale, float offset)
10. {
11.     return Mathf.PerlinNoise((position.x + offset) * scale, (position.y + offset) * scale);
12. }

 

You don't want to use Random.Range because it won't produce consistent results.

The reason they use Perlin Noise is you can give the function an input (x, y) and you'll always get the same output. This is good in this situation where you don't want every time the tile refreshes it produces a different sprite or different mirroring. That would be inconsistent and bad.

However, Perlin Noise sometimes fails to produce different neighbors even if you try to adjust the scale very carefully. YouTube some Perlin Noise visualizations to get it. But the jist is that (x,y) that are near one another remain correlated.

I recommend Xorshift because it's a way - like Perlin Noise - to get consistent output from an input.

All we're doing is taking the bits of an input (x) and bit-shifting them around to produce a pseudo-random. You ultimately want a single output from both x and y, so you can experiment to see what produces good results for you: for example, perhaps adding x + 123 and y + 47 then xorshifting them ea individually, then adding the two results to produce a single integer works for your case. Try some stuff out.

You can see the formula and variants for xorshift on the Wikipedia page.

On the posted code, you'd ultimately replace this

Code (CSharp):

1. int index = Mathf.Clamp(Mathf.FloorToInt(GetPerlinValue(position, rule.m_PerlinScale, 100000f) * rule.m_Sprites.Length), 0, rule.m_Sprites.Length - 1f);

to this

Code (CSharp):

1. int index = Mathf.Abs(XorshiftPosition(position)) %  rule.m_Sprites.Length;

or something like that. You then have a random # from your position input that is randomly distributed across the indices of your sprite array.

 

Thank you for this! This is really helpful.

Yeah, this explains why the random rule tiles would always change when I mouse over them with the tile. GetTileData was probably being called when I did that, and Random.Range was generating a new random seed and therefore a (basically) true random number each time.

It looks like this is working now. I still have a hardcoded solution that checks for duplicate neighbors and picks a new random sprite via Xorshift if necessary. But I also tried making a rule tile with just Xorshift random and without manually checking neighbors, and it seems to work really well. So that's a huge improvement. Thanks again!

For what it's worth, this is what I did for the latter solution.

Spoiler

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. case TilingRule.OutputSprite.Random:
3.     int pseudoRandom = Helper.XORShift(position.x, position.y);
4.     pseudoRandom = Mathf.Abs(pseudoRandom);
5.     int index = pseudoRandom % rule.m_Sprites.Length;
6.     tileData.sprite = rule.m_Sprites[index];
7.  
8.     if (rule.m_RandomTransform != TilingRule.Transform.Fixed)
9.         transform = ApplyRandomTransform(rule.m_RandomTransform, transform, rule.m_PerlinScale, position);
10.                      
11.      break;
12.  

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. //this is in Helper.cs
3. public static int XORShift(int x, int y)
4. {
5.     int t = y ^ (y << 11);
6.     return x ^ (x >> 19) ^ t ^ (t >> 8);
7. }
8.  

 

No, not shared textures. And now that you mention it, they were atlased already, with the default padding. I removed the atlases because the secondary textures disappear in play mode when these atlases are around (see here and below: https://forum.unity.com/threads/sprite-atlases.1119226/#post-7220938).

I put the grid back to it's original size 1, 1, 1, and the seam have disappeared.

 

Does anyone have some experience using the ruletile and custom ruletile script setup? I want to prevent tiles from changing, either at runtime or when a certain bool I set is true during runtime, but work as usual when I am using the editor. I can't seem to find an override in the "customruletile" that will allow me to do this.

I basically want to allow the player to destroy tiles by "setting" them without running the ruleset, but when a player is building (or when I am in the editor) I want to USE the ruleset. Tiles change visuals when I want them to, and don't change when I set them to something else when otherwise stated. (IE if I remove tiles green tiles to dig into the earth, I want it to stay gone and dig into earth and not magically change to green topsoil surroundings).

Psuedo world destruction if you will.

If there currently exists no way for me to turn on and off the functionality for autotiling in this manner, that is a feature I would greatly request be added @rustum

 

I don't see a thread related to the 2D Tilemap Editor package.

 

I have tried to use this with a 3D game but it was very buggy, problems I encountered are:

• It builds on the same tile over and over
• While using the brush, it has no respect to the grid, randomly acts like it is a rectangular grid while in case it is a hex grid.
• Tiles offset are very off in hex mode and I can't even fix this

Here you can see all those issues:

 

Yes the issue was the Anchor value, I didn't touch it beucase it was the default value, after I set it to (0, 0, 0) everything worked flawlessly. Since you asked, here is the content for the GameObjectBrush. Thank you!

 

There was a menu to create brush assets, but now I cannot find it anywhere. Is it a bug?

 

I'm using Unity 2020.3.20 and install this package from Package Manager. The package is 2D Tilemap Extras 1.8.1-preview. I was trying to create the random brush, gameobject brush. Currently I have to write a custom MenuItem to create the brush assets.

 

Hi I'm not using 2021 but I have what is hopefully general UI feedback, using Unity 2020 LTS

1. How do I zoom in and out of the Tile Palette? I tried the usual Unity shortcut of Alt-RMB+cursor but it only pans the view. Is zooming the view possible?
2. Can I change the Tile Palette window background colour? This is a very handy feature in Tiled for tiles that might be the same colour as the interface UI. For example bright green is a useful background colour for seeing small tiles with transparency. (much like the alpha option in Sprite Editor)

 

I find this workflow is too much of a hassle when I have to switch between many brushes in a short while. Even the old workflow (selecting brushes from a dropdown) is a big hassle, but at least I have my brushes set up only once. I think we should have a kind of toolbar for brushes, users can change the layout of that toolbar moving brush buttons here and there according to their needs and preferences. Or at least we should have an expandable list which will ease the brush selecting greatly in the case of multiple premade brushes.

 

nice!

My only other feedback is that for 8x8px tiles, previews are very small in the editor windows and blurry in the tile inspector windows.

It's hard to see what I am selecting.

In other tile editors, 8x8 pixelart tile readability is not an issue.

 

I was talking about toolbar in the scene view too, our views converge here.

But I want to make sure that you truly understand my view of "premade brushes". For me "premade brushes" are variations of random brush and gameobject brush. Rather than selecting items from the Tile Palette times to times, I'll premake them as brushes. For example, I have 2 random brushes for grass, 3 for small rocks, 4 for road tiles, and I have some brushes premade for big objects too. And I want to be able to quickly switch between them from the toolbar. The UX here should be aligned with any painting software, for example Adobe Fresco.



This is what I expect when I was talking about premade brushes and toolbar.

 

Hi. Using Tilemap.SetTilesBlock on array that includes RuleTiles sets their color on the tilemap to "transparent black" (with aplha 0).
This seems to have happened after upgrade to Unity 2021.2.1f1. Before the color would be an opaque white.
Is this a known bug? Is there a repository for bug reports beside this thread?

Thanks!

 

Hey! Just wondering why the layer brush isn't apart of the 2D extras package?

Thanks!