[PENDING] TilePlus Toolkit for Unity Tilemaps

Please install in a 2D project that has the 2D Tilemap Editor package installed.
Please Install the EditorCoroutines package before installing TilePlus Toolkit.

It’s simple: TilePlus Toolkit (TPT) lets you have Unity Tilemap tiles with instance data. And it’s a zero-cost asset as well. But what the heck is instance data anyway?

Documentation

Anyone wanting to add capabilities to tiles runs into a gotchas: you can add fields to tile classes, but you can’t edit them in the Inspector. Even if you could, the changes wouldn’t be saved with the scene. Rather, the changes would affect the tile asset in the project folder which of course means that all painted tiles using that tile asset would also change.

TPT tiles don’t have this problem. When you paint a tile, it becomes an object in the scene, disconnected from the asset. TPT is based on new Tile asset classes and a support library. There are no changes to the standard Tilemap system.

The sample tiles included with TPT add much more flexible animation capabilities including starting and stopping animations or changing them at runtime, tiles with linked prefabs, tiles with trigger zones for spawning tiles or pooled prefabs, tiles with trigger zones that work with custom coding to load new sections of your tilemap, and more.

Wait - what’s a Tile with a linked prefab? It’s a tile that you can have in the palette that when painted immediately spawns a prefab at the same position, but the tile’s own sprite is invisible once painted. If you move the tile the prefab will move to the same position with built-in easing. This makes it super easy to paint prefabs from the tile palette if that’s what you want to do.

Using a plug-in system, these tiles and any you create have access to Unity event functions like Update, a coroutine analog for WaitForSeconds, and can have references to GameObjects, components, assets, etc. If you have DOTween you can tween tile transforms and colors. Tiles can have tags for easy grouping.

Tying it all together is a support library called TpLib. Using TpLib you can search for tiles by tag, class, or interface, and all the information is pre-cached for efficiency. A flexible messaging and persistence system is also included, but you don’t have to use it. “And much more.”

Edit-time functions include creating special Tilemap archives which can be loaded dynamically at runtime or used as Prefabs.

Full source is included. Documentation includes User and Programmer guides, and an API reference in CHM and HTML formats. Five different example scenes illustrate how to use TPT, and they’re explained in the Programmer Guide.

Please use the forum for questions so that everyone can share.