Tile Palette Improvements

Hi,

Awesome work on the tilemap, seems to be able to handle a lot of cases.
Can't wait for isometric grid.

Regarding the tile palette, I think it could have some love.
The UI is not really nice, all those dropdowns... I'm sure you can figure something better. (treeview ?)

For some feedbacks in the meantime:
- Double clicking a tile in the tile palette should select the tile asset in the project
- Is it possible to force the selection of a brush when selecting a tile ?
- Would be really cool to have a checkbox to display the same controls directly in the scene view. At least tools, active tilemap, and brushs.
- Other issue but that's Unity in general, and I hope it will be addressed some day, toggle the scene view to fullscreen, disable the tilepalette window, so impossible to paint. I think it should never disable other windows.
- Active TileMap should be in sync with the tilemap selected in the hierarchy. How many times I though I was drawing on the tilemap in the hierarchy...

Thanks, a nice work again

 

Thank you for the feedback!

Brush dropdown is a bit of a placeholder to get first release out. Don't take this as a promise, but might be replaced with something nicer in the future. We are just not sure how many users will use custom brushes and will there be 10s or 1000s of them in one project. Paint target (active tilemap) dropdown may change, but too early to say. Need more feedback from real projects first, too. Palette dropdown I think is fine.

Makes sense.

I think you mean when picking a tile (selection is different action)? Brush is in charge of what happens when you pick so you could replace Unity default brush with your own that does that. That said, we don't expose API to change active brush at the moment, so you'd need to hack under the hood with reflection. Not an easiest thing to do, but possible.

We could add API for BaseTile to say "I want to be used with this brush", but there are few problems. What will happen if you pick multiple tiles at the same time? Another one is changing brush "secretly", without user realizing it, is something we always try to avoid.

As a rule of thumb, we try hard to keep Scene View very clean of any UI. In isolation having tilemap UI there might make sense, but a world where every Unity feature starts to compete with space in Scene View, is not optimal. Some plugins do it for sure, but I think in the big picture it is not a good idea.

I hear you. This is quite hard to fix unfortunately

In earlier prototypes we had it like that. Personally I actually kind of agree with you, but at the end of the day as a team, we decided to go this other way instead. It is again related to the concept of not making state changes "secretly". Perhaps if the feedback is loud and clear after release, we will re-evaluate.

 

Sorry for the confusion, I mean, selecting a til in the tile palette.
Let's say I put a Door Tile in the tile palette, when I click on it, could it select a brush ? and maybe a specific tilemap ?

 

The same restrictions apply to selection & picking. Both controlled by the brush.

 

One thing you can do is, rather than use fullscreen on the scene view, you can save a custom window layout (Window>Layouts>Save Layout...) where the scene view takes up most of the screen, with just the tile palette on the side and hide the rest of the windows. Save your usual layout first though, so you can easily switch back when you're done working on your tilemap.

 

Yep know this trick, but not really what I want...
Thanks anyway for taking the time to help

 

Just started getting the tile map working last night.

-A comment from further up-
I found that focus mode in the scene view is perfect for highlighting out what layer your on.

Im building A fairly complex set of layers from a 100 peice tile set.

And when I rearrange my pallet in edit mode it does not allways save my changes. The only way I can guarantee it saves is if I add another tile from the project files window.

Also a copy and paste function or clone brush accessible would be a great addition.

 

I can confirm there is a bug where move tool doesn't trigger save for the palette asset. Like you said, some other action like dummy paint or erase is required to trigger the save.

This is fixed in the future builds.

 

I was actually about to post this as a bug. It's so hard to get use to without the ability to just select the Tilemap gameobject in the hierarchy. And it's a dropdown box so there is an extra click. Even just a setting to use old way would be nice.