Defining / Saving Tile Patterns and Painting, Rotating, and Instantiating them at run time

For 2D tile based games, you often need to define tile patterns, for example for area of effect spells, and then instantiate them at run time (for example to show a targeting indicator or AoE effects), sometimes rotating them first.

For example, let's say I want to make a cone AoE pattern like so:



I want to be able to save this pattern (marking the bottom tile as the origin point of the AoE), assign it as an AoE pattern for a spell, and then when casting the spell instantiate this pattern (for example to show targeting and allow the user to choose the cone direction) and rotate it as necessary.

Is there a way to do this with the built-in 2D tools? You can paint them into a palette and then select and paint them into the tilemap in the editor (although there doesn't seem to be a way to select just that cone pattern for a hexagonal grid because you can't shift-click to add tiles and the drag select pattern is wrong). However I can't find a way to save the pattern and then instantiate it at run time.

Do you need to write a custom brush and brush editor for this?

 

Arent Brushes editor only? I think you have to program these shapes by hand.

 

Make it a prefab and be done with it.

Code up some routines to work back from the world position of the prefab to decide what hex it is in.

Here's some more hex reading, since you're using hexes:

Hexagonal maps (hexmaps):

https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/hex-map/

 

Yep, those two hex resources are great I've been using them as references for the game.

So it seems like the answer is that there's no way to do this with the built-in 2D tools and you have to code up everything yourself, including the editor to define and save the tile patterns.

That's a shame because the functionality is all there to create patterns in a palette and paint them using GridBrush in the editor, it's just missing a way to save those patterns and easily use them at run-time. I guess that's not surprising because recently Unity has been releasing lots of feature sets and then abandoning them before they're complete.