Isometric Tilemap Sorting issues

Hello folks,

first of all hearing that you are adding isometric tilemaps was great news.

When I use different Tiles, they seem to be sorted in a strange way by Tile ID and not by their y-value on-screen(or in the tilemap for that matter). For instance the dirt always appears behind the grass tiles, no matter where they get placed. I have tried all things I could imagine and have not moved closer to solving this, so my assumption is that I am either missing some setting, did the setup wrong by not knowing some internal mechanisms or the sorting is somewhat broken.

What I expect to happen is basically this:

(taken from your blogpost)

but what I am actually getting looks like this:



Maybe one of you can point me to the proper settings or can back up my experience, so we can figure out whats going on and find ways to fix it.

Thanks

 

Hello Aliceh,

thank you so much for your swift reply.

I tested it and it works! Thank you so much. I am looking forward to playing around with this more.
Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Here is the same screenshot from before but with the fixes.


Keep on doing great stuff folks!
<3

 

So no sprite atlas, no sorting ?

 

Ok thanks for the explanation

 

This helped me as well. Thanks @MaxHey & @Sebille

 

That fixed it! Thanks @Sebille and @SirStompsalot

 

Does anyone know how to use the Custom Axis Sort feature in the Lightweight render pipeline?

 

@Sebille How do you managed character order with @zulfajuniadi's scene ? because the character will not be in tilemap, isn't it ?

 

I would also be interested to know

 

Hello,

I had some more time to dive into this wonderful new feature, so far I love it, it has great potential to be something really amazing, the groundwork done so far seems solid.
After I made a script that converts sprites and spritesheets into tiles, the workflow is now quite nice (if anybody is interested, its downloadable in the pins of the unity channel in my discord [Link])

Okay, I have done some more testing and for some reason the "Z Position" feature doesn't do what I'd expect, no matter with which setup I use it and whether the z-Position is negative or positive, the result is the same with this setup



Here is an example picture of this image. What I am trying to do is to make "Walls" by changing the z-position without the need to always make a new tilemap for each and every new "layer" I need, I kinda expected the z-position to take care of that. I tried it with Isometric and Isometric Z to Y, the result is the same, there is no way to put a tile "higher" (on screen and in the isometric world) and have it appear in front of the lower tile.

Am I again missing any setting/feature? Or is this intentional? Is this something you plan on having it working?

As soon as I am through with my evaluation for environment building, I will try to play around with Character setup.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend.
Much love <3

 

@Sebille or anybody else..Is there any Info on how to get the "Z-Sorting" to work with this setup?
For instance to make Wall tiles in the same Tilemap that are "higher" on-screen (Y axis) but should be rendered in front of the object with lower z. (See example image I posted earlier)

Because by setting the Y-Sorting in the graphics, it automatically sorts everything with a higher Y value behind all other tiles in the tilemap. While this is great for ground-layers, it completely hinders the placement of any walls or anything. Is this intentional? Should every height-layer be on its own tilemap or will you add additional implementation of the Z-Sorting?

 

This is all very very helpful. Wish I would have read this thread before wasting half a day...

 

@Sebille Thanks for the thorough reply. As well as for the example and explanation of the character.

Yea, I assumed it might not be possible at the current moment. It would be great if you could find out more. Because having played with it for some time, it became apparent that creating a new tilemap on a different sorting layer takes quite a bunch of steps to make, clutters the hierarchy a bit. I personally would love to make use of the z-positioning that seems to be already there, to have an additional way to sort the tiles inside one tilemap.
EDIT: Just saw the gif you posted on twitter [Link] - how do you switch between different heights so quickly? Did you setup different grids for different heights before or am I missing some shortcuts?

I am thinking for use-cases where I would want to build a house or a high structure like a church with tiles for instance (as the ones from my 2D isometric village pack)...imagining that I need to have each layer in its own tilemap and switch through them as I work sounds a bit counter-intuitive for me at the moment.

I would really love to have some sort of option (possibly in the non z-to-y mode) to use the z-value to also sort tiles in a way. This could also be done by giving the tiles actual z-offset (I saw in the editor, they are all flat on one layer), and then add the Z-Axis in the custom sorting settings so have both work at the same time?

So far I have achieved walls by having two tilemaps and giving the second one a higher sorting order and then change the anchor position.

In the Z as Y Tilemaps, I was a bit surprised to see that if I stay at the same grid position and change the Z, it jumps behind the tiles but as they are sorted by their Y value, it does make sense...if somehow the Z could also be taken into account (then the tiles would need to have an offset or somehow tell the render engine that they have an internal z value that they can be sorted with? no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes what could be achieved by writing depth or idk...). I understand its a rather complex issue since those 2D tilemaps are probably supposed to be as flat as a pancake.

If somehow possible, they could be non-flat, then that would be an easy fix to allow for any z-offset.

If otherwise possible the tilemaps could also support a 3D coordinate system setup, where the tiles are placed according to their x-y-z position in the 3d coordinate system, each tile would need to be rotated (x:30,y:45) but this setup would also allow for the tilemap feature to be intertwined with setting up tile-based 2.5D/3D maps
As in this example:

In this example, the 2D tiles are setup in the 3D coordinate system and rotated towards the camera. With this setup, even navmeshes could be used and the tiles could easily be replaced with 3D prefabs as well.

I am not sure how flexible the tilemap system is but it would surely be cool if it could support this setup.
If not, thats also fine its a great too so far.

In any case: Keep up the great work Unity Team.

Much love <3

 

Thanks @Sebille, yep got that working.

Setting the Grid to Isometric Z as Y did the trick for me. Not sure why you it's not working for you. Though I suspect our implementation might be a bit different.

This is an infinite terrain I built with the new isometric tilemap:



And this is with the Grid set to Isometric only:

 

Great job @zulfajuniadi ! Could you tell us about your implementation? Are you using ECS for anything?

 

Nope, just plain old single threaded monobehaviours. The terrain chunks are rather small (64x64) and the heights are direct sampled from a simple perlin noise function. I don't think it would matter much if I were to switch to ECS as the bulk of the time (2ms out of the 3ms) is spent on rendering.

 

what @sibelle had in the twitter gif is this

I think this is what is being missed. What we have in 2018.3 is this




some sort of special script "grid brush" that isn't built in and I have no idea how to make...

 

You can grab that (and other cool stuff related to tilemaps) here: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/2d-techdemos

 

I have tried out those brushes and not get the desired results...

Can you tell more about how you set up the tiles? Do you use a Z to Y map? Are there tiles underneath the elevated tiles? A step-by-step walkthrough for the setup would be nice, so I could try to replicate that with my blocky tiles.
Are you using any Z-positioning or height? Or are you simply drawing the slopes between the heights based on the y to give the impression of height?

Yea, I would still like to know whether putting walls on the same layer is possible at all. Might not be...I have the strong sense that it comes down to how the collision with the tiles work but I need to do some more testing.

Cheers for the replies so far

 

@Sebille



You are amazing!!! <3
Thanks for finding that out for me, this is perfect.
So. Happy. Right. Now.

Thx for the brilliant communication and swift feedback, you lot are amazing.

And thank you so much for your lovely and kind feedback, I am really happy you like the art and the style. <3
It is a great honor for me to see them used and portrayed that way, so I feel deep gratitude.

I will keep you updated if I find anything again (I hope not tho )

 

For this to work, must the walls be rendered with Mode set to Individual? Chunk does not work for me whether or not character/wall are in the same Atlas, but Individual works.

 

Yes chunk would not work because it'll be rendered as one big quad mesh

 

Hi,
I wanted to ask if there is some nice way to do isometric tiles that characters can go inside. I mean that a single tile would have a front and back part.

It almost seems to work: I can in the Tile Palette have two tiles on the same location if I those have a different z-position, but when I try to paint with those it seems that only the one on z-position gets placed.

 

Hi Unity family :V
I finally completed a "ground rule tile" who works very well \o/
Of course I had to apply all the changes above.
47 cubes are needed for all scenarios :F

 

@Sebille Using the single tilemap for multiple Z levels works like a charm until I try to get units to render over the floor (z = 0) and under the walls (z = 1) with batch culling mode. It works on Individual, but even with an atlas I cant figure this one out.

I didn't try actually building the game, but if i'm following correctly i assume that doesnt matter?

 

Batching works fine in with sprite atlas, z positions and individual rendering @max4260

 

@zulfajuniadi I think i misspoke. Should have said I can't get chunk mode to work with a unit, not other tilemap assets.

 

Yeah the sorting doesn't work properly if you set the draw mode to chunks. Though it should work fine with individual tiles. Even with other sprite renderers:

https://i.gyazo.com/456da4f8a21f9b93acba9409b1014dd4.mp4

 

@zulfajuniadi ok, I assumed according to this post chunk would work with an atlas. maybe its a bug?

 

Nice screenshot. Curious, did you have any advice for multi-tile objects such as structures.

 

Hello, I'm trying to use the new isometric tilemap system.

In my example I'm trying to make my character move under a bridge, or show up in front of it according to where it stands on the grid.

It works, mostly, but on some locations the player moves behind or in

front of the bridge where he should not

 

Have you checked out this thread? https://forum.unity.com/threads/isometric-tilemap-sorting-issues.554914/

 

I did, and I've made the changes noted over there, this still persists.

 

Hey Unity Bro', I have a question about Tint Brush: I can't tint a cube because it said "
Tint brush cancelled, because Tile (GrassStone01) has TileFlags.LockColor set. Unlock it from the Tile asset debug inspector.
UnityEngine.GUIUtilityrocessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)"
Anybody knows what it could be happen ?

 

@Sebille any updates on this? it's been a few months and tbh I feel kinda stuck on the sorting front as stated above.

 

The sorting works fine. Hard to say why it's not working for you.


[Video]

These are my settings:

 

Hi zulfajuniadi, thx for the answer, I have the exact same settings as you, but as you can see from my video it does not work in all occasions, also, in you video you can see it does not work 100% of the time, for example the people who walk of the stone bridge are not behind the bridge pillars but walk over it.

 

I have also a sorting bug @Sebille

Settings :

Axes settings :


Grid settings :


Tilemap settings :


"Character" settings:


Result :

 

Done

Case 1088821

 

I recommend you edit your post and remove the link and post the id only, otherwise you give everyone access to all your reported and future reported bugs, which might at one time perhaps contain sensitive information which you don't really want to share with the world.

 

Thanks for the answer

Yes

Indeed, I just tested it for be sure