[RELEASED] - proTile Map Editor

Finally got the chance to try the beta myself and the layer feature looks like a very welcome addition on top of the runtime editing feature. And yeah, Layers should cover wall/roof culling nicely or I can just modify some. Thanks for your reply and please do continue the good work

[Edit]Oh and the load async demo was impressive

 

Hi,
I wanted to ask you about patterns.Are they Unity prefabs or your own custom solution?
How would they work if say I want to make a pattern based on some wall prefabs,one of which I edit afterwards.Will the pattern update itself due to the wall prefab change?

Thanks

 

Hey there I'm just evaluating purchasing a level construction editor and found your tool. While it looks very polished I'm having a couple of questions.

This was our initial mockup that shows really basic tiles, similar to a scenario you display on the first page:
http://acumen-design.de/games/mockups/marble_test_level5.jpg

However when we dug a little deeper in our visual style and workflows we stumbled upon several issues.

Here's our basic premise:
1) Using cubes and lego pieces resulted in many overlapping faces that resulted in harsh flickering on iPod and iPad.
How are you handling that issue. Are overlapping faces deleted automatically ? Any other tricks that prevent such glitches ?
2) We strictly use level pieces in 1unit steps pieces. E.g. a ramp that is 2 units high, 3 wide and 4 long. We have many different ramp variations like that - can theye all be used within your system ?
3) We would like to use unity beast lightmapping. However we experienced some seam issues with our "use only modular pieces that have all these overlapping faces" approach - how is that handled with your tool ?
4) Can the tool be used to apply details (e.g. a deco object) on walls, too ? Or are these limited to the floor only ?

Because of these issues we made up a really weird workflow that involves creating the base level in unity, then export it to our modeling app, delete unneeded faces and combine it into one big mesh. Highly timewasting for our +40 levels.

In theory your tool seems really promising for our needs but I would really like to get these questions answered before we do our purchases.
I can show you a precise picture of the details and tiles we want to use in our game, if that makes it any easier to answer our questions.

Thanks a lot and congrats to a really nice tool !

 

Hey thanks for being so quick to answer these.
We haven't purchased, not sure if that came across in my posting. The video looks super helpful but I'm gonna make a picture tomorrow that can hopefully explain our needs even better. In theory your tool will save us hours of hours but we want to make extrasure before we invest time to learn another toolset
1. The flickering issue we found threads and issues all over the unity forums. Floating point errors, Z-fighting, coplanar faces - whatever you may call it. So how can this be too good to be true that you are not experiencing this with the way proTile Map is designed - which is tons of overlapping faces, I guess
Witchcraft ??

 

Hey, I just sent you an email.
I wasn't sure whether it was appropriate to hijack your thread for your very specific isses.
I read the documentation over and over again, as well as watching the videos and it looks just right for us. But we tried our best to think it all through for our needs and therefore have some more indepth questions

Thanks a lot for being so supportive !

 

Hey there,
just thought I'd give out a round of feedback
creating the tiles and prefabs works wonderfully. However for an absolute beginner like myself, it was unclear that I have to hit the "play button" in order to start the editor

What I have the biggest biggest problem with are these 2 key features
1) Why did you change around the movement of the cam. I find it highly irritating to adapt 2 different cam/movement styles in the same app. I would love to use the standard unity way of working. That would be muuuuch more streamlined. At least offer both preferences as a choice.
2) Missing the undo feature. Not having that in a level editor is really counter-constructive. I don't always want to use the erasor. Sometimes a simple ctrl-z would speed up my workflow tremendously.

Some more things:

3) The documentation doesn't really cover all the functions that are included in the toolset and often I just have to guess what it does.
4) When I want to scroll through the level tiles, often it happens that I accidentally place a tile in the screen which is really annoying in the workflow. This should not happen in a streamlined production.
5)The preview of the tiles are all rotated wrong. No idea why that happens, but I can imagine when having different pieces that looks similar that might get confusing really fast.
6) There should be a way to deselect the current tile so one has a clear mouse arrow and not always a level piece attached to it.
7) The ability to select a group of blocks, just like in unity would be another very well needed feature. E.g. when I see that a path is too long between two sections there is no sane way I can reduce it, without having to erase a ton and then rebuild one of the according parts.
8) Sometimes when the erasor is selected I accidentally delete tiles, without clicking or holding anything. That is really frustrating, as well, and shouldn't really be happening considering the claimed feature in the editor.
9)The ability to save, load and start a new map IN the actual editor is something that seems really like a must-have feature as well. Having to close and restart just to reload a map, or start a new one is not very intuitive.
10) The grid up/down thing does something weird to me. While it's correct that when I press "grid up", the level and the grid gets moved closer to each other, what I actually see is the level moving down. Since the grid stays in its place. So maybe by using different wordins that becomes much clearer. E.g. "Move tiles up" would work much better, imo.
11) Using the mouse wheel for zooming does work opposite to what a user is used to as well. Up goes further away in your editor, while in unity itself it goes closer. Another weird behaviour to me.

So far the tool really helps us to speed up building levels by the mouse clicking and snapping process, as well as the tile selection. However many control related things feel worse from a user point of view compared to unity's base scene navigation. Like I mentioned, having to adapt different workflows in the same environment feels very weird.
The core of the building process works quite flawless and is a great and excellent base.
However there are many things that I feel could be much improved to serve as a great great tile building editor !
I have worked with numerous level editors in the past, so I can kind compare some things based on this experience.
Would be absolutely wonderful if some of these things could be adressed in the future. I'm quite sure these are not exclusive for us.

Thanks a lot so far for creating this tool

edit: grrr, now it just happened again. I had selected a new tile and while moving around on editor screen the movement deleted all my level..Having to constantly hit save to avoid this is quite weird :/

 

hey proandrius! your protile asset looks amazing! I've got a few little question before buying the asset. In general, would it be possible to use proTile as an ingame map editor? I'm trying to create a multiplayer game, so my goal is to use protile as a ingame map editor, where you can save the map and later on use it to play the created map with your friends. I know some of the features might be missing ( Lightmaps etc) but in general, it would be possible, right?

 

Hello!

I want to know, can I use it for voxel engine, to create minecraft style maps?
For this engine: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/uniblocks-cube-based-infinite-voxel-terrain-engine.226014/

 

Hello,
I'm looking for a tile editor that will allow me to create 3D maps of varying height, and which allows tiles of variable width. Can your tool do this? I didn't see any such features in the video demo or documentation.

Thanks!

 

*bump*

Is this no longer in development? Being supported? Have many used it in published work? Please help me out here.

 

*BUMP*

 

Hey! is this still in development?

 

Cool, was a little bit confused since the last answer was long time ago and i didnt want to buy a "dead" asset but good to know that its still in development
dont know if the question already got asked but how is the ui done in 2.0 beta? ngui, ugui (4.6) or hard coded?

 

ok, great.
bought it right now and will drop you a mail for the 2.0 beta

 

Hi Proandrius,

I bought your plugin today. I had bough another tile plugin and I wasn't happy at all, yours looks very clean and striaghtforward, thank you very much!

I wrote you a mail, but I'll post here as well to bump the thread.

I need to change the tile snap size as well, this would be very welcome.
It's near to impossible to work with larger tiles (I'm working with 16 unit tiles) specially when using connections.

And also:

This would be very nice as well.
Looking forward for the next release!

Cheers,

 

I just discovered the RuntimeExample_1 scene. now iam feeling super stupid. sorry, so ignore this message

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey,
so i had some time testing the Beta Editor and working with the old GUI System if you have never worked with it before is pretty Hard (i used NGUI in the past and switched now to the new 4.6. UI)

I tried the _proTileMapEditor.unity* Scene from the Assets>proTileMapEditor folder and I already like the setup of it but just wanted to edit some stuff. For Example get rid of the Category Tab (since i just have 1 Category so i don't need it). And also the "Tile Mode" Tab. I am somehow just used to Search for it during the Game is running and turn it then off in the inspector. And not searched in some .cs files where things might be,

So what i just want to say is, that uGUI would make customization a lot easier without everybody has to setup his own editor again and again - that would be a good reason to me to update it to the 4.6. UI

like i said, i really like the editor but small tweaks are a huge blackbox for me.

* is THIS scene even the Runtime Editor? Iam not really sure. since when i make a Build it just say "press play to run the Map Editor". Iam confused

 

i just have to spam threw you thread again since iam stucked somehow with putting the uGUI stuff together.

so in your example you have this line of code

Code (CSharp):

1. // Press 1 to set build mode to NORMAL
2. else if(Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Alpha1))
3.          {
4.              runtimeBuilder.SetBuildMode(uteRuntimeBuilder.BuildMode.Normal);
5.          }
6. // Press 2 to set build mode to Continous
7. else if(Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Alpha2))
8.          {
9.              runtimeBuilder.SetBuildMode(uteRuntimeBuilder.BuildMode.Continuous);
10.          }

so i crawled threw some uGUI tutorials and found this one pretty handy: http://www.thegamecontriver.com/2014/08/create-a-menu-in-unity-4-6.html

so i've set up this file to test if i can change the Build mode to Continous by a Button press

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3. using System.Collections.Generic;
4. public class MenuScript : MonoBehaviour {
5.  
6.         // Main class for runtime building
7.     private uteRuntimeBuilder runtimeBuilder;
8.     private List<uteRuntimeBuilder.Category> allCategories = new List<uteRuntimeBuilder.Category>();
9.     private bool isShow;
10.  
11.     private void Start()
12.     {
13.         isShow = true;
14.  
15.         // Get runtime builder main class
16.         runtimeBuilder = (uteRuntimeBuilder) this.gameObject.GetComponent<uteRuntimeBuilder>();
17.  
18.         // List all available category names
19.         List<string> allCategoryNames = runtimeBuilder.GetListOfCategoryNames();
20.  
21.         for(int i=0;i<allCategoryNames.Count;i++)
22.         {
23.             // Get all Category tiles and info by name
24.             allCategories.Add(runtimeBuilder.GetCategoryByCategoryName(allCategoryNames[i]));
25.         }
26.     }
27. public void OnClickPlay()
28. {
29.   Application.LoadLevel("Play");
30. }
31.  
32. public void OnClickContinuous()
33. {
34.   runtimeBuilder.SetBuildMode(uteRuntimeBuilder.BuildMode.Continuous);
35. }
36.  
37. }

and then did basically this:


just instead of the OnClickPlay() function i called the OnClickContinuous() Function. But that doesent work. do you maybe know why?

 

i just saw that the menu script nees to be in the same gameobject asthe uteRuntimeBuilder.cs
that was the mistake i did. now it works

now everything is fine for me i guess. The API is really easy to use as you already said. the only "hard" thing will be to make a scrollable area for all the components/prefabs that are available. but i cant imagine that this will be too hard

for a better camera behavior thing i used "KGF Camera system" from the asset store.
works pretty good except when i turn on panning - that i can not build Continous cause when i drag there, i also drag the camera around

 

Hello, I bought the editor a couple a days ago and have been mailing your for the beta since, but It's pretty clear by now that the emails are not getting through. How, if I can't reach you by email, can I get beta access?
Without layers the editor is pretty useless for me

a question, where do you resize the tile, inside runtime mode or in tile editor? Couldn't seem to find it. Thanks for a cool editor!

 

I've bought one license as well as sent some emails to you recently. I'm gonna to have one copy of your beta version; and also curious about how to get across to map objects during runtime. There are no identifiers for objects.

 

I don't know if you have received my reply via email ;-)

With no significant problem in v1.4, the first experience in 2.0 beta 4 resulted something not good. All objects belong to House category cannot display, and when I try to use the manager to clear them, it stops responding.

I have tried many times, creating new projects, all failed when I choose the category 'House'.

 

Well it is only a very slight problem. Using your compressed package resulted in some mesh missing, thus caused that problem. Generally speaking your work is great; yet as a programmer rather than game developer, I have to change some mechanisms to make it more flexible, especially saving & loading.

 

Interested will keep watch. I wonder how you use your custom sprites in this. I have lot of 2d sprites that i want to use.Mainly interested in it for using in 2D games like platformer or top down.

 

I am going to keep my eyes on this one. The most important thing is runtime editor that has a reasonably flexible GUI system builtin. (like NGUI , Unity GUI < not the old one , new 4.6 one >) So we may jump start on it without having to start from scratch. Digging current old unity GUI stuff to customize things are probably the most thing people want to avoid.

 

I hear that proTile Map Editor have problem about placing big size scale building
v2.0... Is this problem will be solved?

and can this tool use with Unity Terrain system or TerrainComposer?