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Tilemap Bugs & Workflow Feedback

Discussion in '2D Experimental Preview' started by Travis-Goetz, Jan 6, 2017.

  1. Travis-Goetz

    Travis-Goetz

    Joined:
    Feb 5, 2015
    Posts:
    7
    Hi Unity 2D Team,

    Sharing some general feedback on the Tilemap features and a couple of bugs - apologies if any of this is redundant. I've been using the R3 build on OSX 10.12.

    Bugs:

    Palette Window: dragging a tile (w/ a GO attached in the standard tile properties) to the palette displays the attached gameobject erratically - sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. More problematic is that these tiles persist through attempting to delete/replace them, so they are permanently affixed to the palette. I haven't encountered this bug with tiles that do not have a GO attached.

    Playing the scene, restarting Unity, and rebuilding asset library doesn't fix this. The only solution I found is to drag the actual palette prefab to the scene view, manually delete them from there, and save the prefab.

    Deleted/old tiles and colliders pop up frequently in the scene view - hitting play usually solves this.

    Workflow Feedback:

    I've found it to generally be much more stable and intuitive than all third-party solutions I've tried.

    Aforementioned bugs aside, the palette window, tools, and hotkeys feel pretty natural. The included Pipeline, Terrain, and Random tile scripts all seem extremely useful for common 2D game scenarios.

    Animated Tiles: dragging frames manually for limited animation functionality seems a bit pointless to me when I could just use a dummy tile to instantiate a prefab that uses normal animation. I don't see an advantage to ever using this instead, but maybe someone else can chime in here.

    Have had no problems extending BaseTile to create custom tile functionality in the editor, but it would be great to have a simpler method for attaching MonoBehaviour scripts to individual tiles. Currently, I can either attach a GameObject to the tile asset to accomplish this, or attach a script to an entire tile layer in the scene. Neither method seems very intuitive.

    Creating a prefab for palettes seems like an unnecessary step for the user, unless there's a reason they'd need to modify them directly. As a suggestion: handle it exclusively from the Palette window without creating a user-facing prefab. Best example I can provide here is how mecanim handles animation states.

    Lastly, are there specific types of bugs or feedback that would be helpful to report here?


    I know it's probably beating a dead horse at this point and there's a disclaimer about these being experimental features that may not be released, but is there confidence that tilemap features will make it into a release build? If so, is there any loose or ballpark ETA?

    Appreciate all the hard work that has been put in. I think it's awesome already and would love to see it. :D
     
  2. Johaness_Reuben

    Johaness_Reuben

    Joined:
    Jan 27, 2016
    Posts:
    253
    Thanks for the great feedback.
    Animated Tiles - This is useful for simple animations without having to setup a prefab with animator/animations. Especially so when doing synced tiling animated tiles. Its a simpler alternative solution for simpler uses.

    The palette prefab serves a few purposes. One of it is a way to share palettes. I understand what you mean with the mecanim example. With the palettes, we were looking at how extensively we want to support palette editing. While we're trying to put as much editing capabilities in the Palette , I think that having the ability to edit the palette prefab in the scene can help in more complex editing scenarios, without having to replicate the functionality in the Palette window. Example is multi layered tilemaps where I need to adjust some parameters for the entire layer. We've already put some layer functionality in the Palette.
    This is the first interation of this palette prefab, we're trying it out to see if it works and there's more to be done with it too.
    The prefab itself does not need to be edited anywhere else but the Palette. Is it an issue to have the palette prefab as a user-facing prefab? One of my concerns is confusion over a tilemap prefab and a palette prefab. Currently palette prefabs have their renderers turned off.
    Would like to hear more thoughts on this.