Bug Raycast2D against procedural tilemap (w/o composite) does not detect tilemap collider

Posting for posterity's sake. Just wasted a couple hours trying to figure out why doing a Physics2D.Raycast and/or Physics2D.RaycastNonAlloc against a tilemap collider (Without composite) will FAIL if the map was built within the same frame.

CONTEXT:
I've got a 2D procedurally generated "cave" game. It does a lot of work on load, including using a noise function to generate a texture, then a series of operations on that texture which ultimately gets turned into a tilemap using rule tiles and such.

Immediately after terrain generation and rendering, it spawns entities based on spawn tables built using scriptable objects. Objects being spawned so far were just trying to find empty spots, which works just fine by checking the "walls" tilemap for empty places to put new entities. However, we just added a new entity type that spawns against a wall - and this was where our trouble began.

Capitalizing on the original methods to find an empty position in the tilemap - I then used the approach to find a random direction from the empty spot found, and raycast against the terrain to find a spot on a wall to spawn the new entity - and every attempt to do so failed to collide with anything...

SOLUTION:
After much deliberation, it was discovered that the logic was fine, but trying to raycast against a tilemap collider on/within the same frame it was "generated" or modified on must not have updated colliders.

This was discovered after attaching the spawning of these entities to a button instead of on load of the map - once attached to a button press, it worked without issue.

CONCLUSION:
Perhaps I missed something in the documentation, but also searching online yielded nothing useful. This was headache enough I felt the need to post about it in case it helps someone in the future. If it's not in the documentation, it should be added and made bold: Dynamically creating a tilemap does not immediately update/generate colliders, one must wait a frame before tying a 2D raycast - or it will always fail.

EDIT 1:
Turns out frame is not even the important part - I had to set an intentional delay of 1-3 seconds before spawning these entities. I would hope that if it's an inner working of Rule Tile (Such as queueing data before actually creating colliders and stuff) then there should be an event I can use to hook into when it's ready - not yet found

 

I very much appreciate the link. Not sure how I missed this, but thanks! I removed our intentional delay and added a call to ProcessTilemapChanges and that did in fact solve the issue. For reference, if anyone else finds this useful, based on your link I also spotted this one, which may be used when you're not sure if you need to process changes or not but want to check: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Tilemaps.TilemapCollider2D-hasTilemapChanges.html

Edit : I could not find a way to remove the Bug tag, which no longer applies

 

Hi,

I'm having a similar problem to the one described above, but unfortunately calling ProcessTilemapChanges doesn't work in my case. I've a dynamically created hex grid, with four tilemaps as children, with each tilemap providing a layer over each other - terrain, fog of war, movement, and path finding. What I want to do is create a line-of-sight algorithm, by taking an origin hex, finding all the hexes within a certain range of the origin, then doing a Physics2D.LinecastAll on all the hexes in range. With all the RaycastHit2D results for each hex in range, I can then determine which hexes the origin hex can see, based on the height of each hex in the results. My problem is that I'm only able to ever detect the first (origin) hex, even though (debug) drawing the lines shows that they pass into all the required hexes.

As I said, the tiles are dynamically set into the tilemaps, with the collider types also being dynamically set (I've tried all the types with no success). The map is created in the Start method after which the LinecastAll method is called. One of the tilemaps I'm using has a TilemapCollider2D (and I've tried adding Ridgidbody2D as well). The code to is below

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. TilemapCollider2D terrainCollider =     terrain.GetComponent<TilemapCollider2D>();
3.             if (terrainCollider.hasTilemapChanges)
4.             {
5.                 terrainCollider.ProcessTilemapChanges();
6.             }
7.  
8.             BaseHex unitPosition = unitStack.Position;
9.             Vector3 origin = terrain.CellToWorld(unitPosition.PositionToVector());
10.  
11.             BaseHex[] hexesInRange =
12.                 Hex.NeighborsWithInRange(
13.                     unitPosition,
14.                     unitStack.MaxVisibilityRange(),
15.                     hexData.MapWidth,
16.                     hexData.MapHeight,
17.                     false);
18.  
19.             for (int i = 0; i < hexesInRange.Length; i++)
20.             {
21.                 BaseHex hex = hexesInRange[i];
22.                 Vector3 destination =
23.                     terrain.CellToWorld(hex.PositionToVector());
24.  
25.                 RaycastHit2D[] results = Physics2D.LinecastAll(destination, origin);
26.                 Debug.LogError("Number of results = " + results.Length + ", origin=" + origin + ", destination=" + destination);
27.  
28.                 foreach(RaycastHit2D hit in results)
29.                 {
30.                     Vector3Int hitLoc =
31.                         terrain.WorldToCell(new Vector3(hit.point.x, hit.point.y, 0));
32.                     Debug.LogError(hitLoc);
33.                 }
34.             }

I'm just wondering what I'm missing here. It seems from the above post that his should work. Thanks in advance for any advice on this.