Custom Tilemap in Unity with Saving and Loading (Level Editor) 

So good

Your videos are always interesting but very hard to follow.

@@technofeeliak What couldn't you understand?

Why don't you just use Tiled? It's a free full blown application for building tilemaps.

Does it work witth unity 32 bits

I'm glad the videos helped you! Thanks!

Yes in there it should be new TilemapObject(g, x, y); to use the grid that is passed in the function and not the one in the field. I fixed it later but it gets cut off in the video because that line ended up way too big.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thanks for the comment though, following this tutorial with sleepy eyes because the learning value is so addictive, can't stop, but I had nullpointers at runtime. This was the problem. Thank you for this series by the way!

THX this comment helped me

Helped me too... this was driving me mad!

Thanks for pointing it out! This was keeping me from going forward with the rest of the tutorial!

for me, the tiles are still displaced... any idea why ?

@@gabypounou3793 I had this problem too, for me the issue was that the testing and tilemapvisual game objects were not at (0,0,0)

Use the Attribute [ExecuteInEditMode]

You could dynamically place a BoxCollider on each Tile position that you wanted to block. Or you can just make another Grid System to hold the walkable state, and when the player moves ask the Grid System is the player can move there, so pretty much just like the Pathfinding system unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=alU04hvz6L4

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thank you for such a quick reply, great ideas to consider 😄

A big mesh is a lot more performant. You can easily render 1000 tilemap quads, very difficult to get 1000 sprite renderers. For smooth transitions you could draw the transitions as half transparent and put them on another tilemap on top of the base one.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity I almost thought so. But unfortunately you seem to have updated your utility classes, they are no longer congruent as in the video. So I wasn't able to follow the video with your utils. Thanks for the quck anwser!

Nevermind, I just followed your other videos and created the utils by myself. Keep it up great work! Hope you stay safe and healthy tooo!

Me again! Puuh I'm stupid! You uploaded the MeshUtils but it was in a diffrent folder.. lmao.

Update, I found the problem and made a makeshift solution but I would love to know what I did wrong because it is messy code, my problem is that the variables grid, x, and y are never assigned. I followed the tutorial step by step but I still must have missed somthing, thanks in advance.

I seem to have fixed the problem but I have no idea how...

You mean when creating the object? Those variables (grid, x, y) are set in the TilemapObject Constructor 3:02

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thank you for responding so quickly! Yes, I think I forgot to set the grid value because that was the one that was null. I have finished the tutorial now but I have another problem. In between the tiles you can sometimes see lines, after some research I found that this was also a problem with the tilemap from unity. But all solutions I could find were to add pixel bleed (wich I am not sure how to add) or something else you can only do in the built in unity tilemap system. Do you have any idea how to fix these lines? Thank you so much for your help, I would not have been able to make my current project without you.

@@oystudios3052 Maybe try enabling Anti aliasing

I write fast but not that fast!

Practice!

Yeah Isometrics and Hex maps are something I'd like to look into.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Pathfinding for isometric maps would be really nice.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Hey CM i'm new here but would love to show you my implementation of your grid for use with isometric maps, i currently use it alongside the default tilemap to make both drawing previewing and interactions easier (i use procedurally generated terain, so all of the tiles come from code anyway)

You would need to modify the Mesh code to create a Hex shape. I covered the math for getting all the hex points in this video unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=dqframYHfws Then you would use those points as the vertices and set up the triangles

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thank you, I will try to that!

Depends if you want the inventory to have "fixed" positions or not. I also covered a inventory with a grid system here ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fxaDBE71UHA.html All the positions are fixed, whereas the other inventory has a virtual list so its unlimited.

Use Debug.Log to find what is null unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=5irv30-bTJw

if you're the same as me, he didn't show it in the video but in the Tilemap.cs, in the Tilemap constructor it needs to look like this: grid = new Grid(width, height, cellSize, originPosition, (Grid g, int x, int y)=>new TilemapObject(g, x, y)); but in the video, he shows: grid = new Grid(width, height, cellSize, originPosition, (Grid g, int x, int y)=>new TilemapObject(grid, x, y)); I'm not sure why he doesn't either explain the change or show in the video when he fixes it

It starts where the GameObject is located so just move that game object Alternatively expand the script to add a simple Vector2 offset

It won't help you when using the CodeMonkey tilemap class, but if you use the Unity tilemap tool and download/add the 2D Extras package, you can use Rule tiles to control auto-updating of tiles to respond to other nearby tiles.

Any solution to this? I have ideas .. but seems tricky... Perhaps multiple passes over the grid to generate the joining parts after by checking neighbours? Would love your help @Code Monkey

I'm not sure since I never tested them side by side, I know this one is very performant since it's based on a single generated Mesh. Do a quick prototype to test it. But unless you have really small tiles I doubt there would be any performance issues

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Ah...see you absolutely nailed the problem. I'm trying to do a tilemap similar to the game Starbound (give it a quick search if you haven't seen it). The problem is that each tile in Starbound is made up of four 'sub' tiles. That obviously means that each tile is 1/4th the size of a regular tile but consequently there are 4x as many tiles in the world (It results in very smooth terrain almost to the point where sometimes it doesn't even look like a block game). I'm sort of stuck on how to make a system like this which is actually efficient. I know it's likely possible through the use of some trickery but I'm drawing a blank. I know this is a bit off topic here, but how would you go about making a system like that, theoretically speaking?

@@dragonlord1935 Oh right for something like that you definitely need a very performant approach. The biggest challenge with that is more with keeping the state of all those nodes. If I were making that I would probably use my system since it was made specifically to work on top of my Grid class which would be perfect for that type of game. But with that scale you cant have just a single Grid for the whole world so one very tricky challenge is how to break the world into tons of separate grids and handle any connections between them.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Do you by chance know of a way to only load parts of an object? So essentially, only loading the tiles around the player into active memory while keeping everything else in a "lazy" data only format? how would you only load parts of a mesh? Is that even possible?

@@dragonlord1935 You can't load parts of an object but you can organize your world into multiple objects as opposed to a single one. So instead of a giant mesh occupying the whole entire world you split the world into say 100 meshes and only show the 5 nearest to the player.

You need to be using the Grid class made in the previous video, not the Unity one ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8jrAWtI8RXg.html

@@CodeMonkeyUnity I'm using it and it still doesn't work :/

The order is based on the vertices array. vertices[1] will show up on top of vertices[0] The best approach might be to have a base tilemap, and then make a second one on top that only contains the tiles you want overlayed.

Pause the game while running and look at the object, has the mesh been created?

Click on TilemapVisual object that you created in Object Hierarchy make sure the transform x and y are set to 0). The visual will then appear on top of the text grid when you do the click to change from None to Ground.

The solution: create a GetWorldPostion where you return z as the y value and pass that to the tile map. This will create the entire tile map as if it was 2D. Then simply rotate the x 90 deg in the editor on the tilemapVisual gameobject. This will create a tile map along the x,z and it works with the Mouse3D positions.

I've done a video on Damage Popups, to make it work in 3D just rotate the Text towards the camera ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iD1_JczQcFY.html

@@CodeMonkeyUnity yes sir i view this its just popup.....i want to detect from which direction the player getting shots...just like pubg.....

If you want more control over how the Tilemap works or is rendered or if you're already using the same Grid class to handle logic objects. If all you want is a basic visual Tilemap then the built-in works just fine.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thanks for the response! :P

Yes

Making one grid to handle pathfinding and another separate one for the Tilemap is the better approach. Yes, with this system instead of slicing the sprites directly in the sprite editor, you just have one big texture and you "slice" it manually by defining the UV Vector2s for each tile.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thanks for your response. My tileset is quite complicated with around 6-10~ tiles for each dirt, grass, water with all the corners & joining edges etc. What would be the best method for making these joining sprites work? Some kind of multiple pass system? Where it draws the basics dirt/grass tile first then does a second pass checking neighbours and changing them accordingly? Edit: Do you think I would be better using unity 2d extras rule tiles? And generating a grid of rule tiles? I assume this will be more taxing, but if just loading a map on initial game load is that ok? OR will it cause gameplay lag?

​@@pepsipwns666 Making edges join smoothly is quite tricky, you could have a second tilemap on top of the base one and on that second tilemap you would draw the edge smooth texture for all combinations which in that case would be quite a lot. Best approach would probably be multiple tilemaps for each type and make tiles for the transitions that fade away. So the water tilemap would be on the bottom, then the grass above that one with a grass tile that smoothly fades away which would look like it fades into the water.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thanks so much for your responses really giving me food for thought. To give you an idea of what I'm trying to achieve, its a top down game that I would like to randomly generate maps for (on initially loading your game, so doesn't have to be super quick). It doesn't need to be massively random just different enough... So your saying one tilemap per type (water, dirt, grass) etc, have it draw the water first (entire map covered in water?), then next tilemap draws dirt and can detect when its placing the last tile on x/y axis (the edge/corner tiles) and place edge sprites accordingly? How/where/when would I detect this? xD My other idea was to generate entire tilemap of water, then run another pass over the same tilemap changing 'chunks' of it to grass / dirt sections. Somehow 'saving' blocks of dirt/grass as preset areas of dirt/grass? and just blopping them about? If that makes sense... maybe if I could draw/save some chunks and have them spawn randomly ... Edit: Would I be saving myself a lot of hassle using the Unity 2d RuleTiles? I was hoping I could make use of the MeshRenderer system you have going... but it seems very difficult to involve smooth edges... I have managed to create a 1000*1000 randomly generated map with 'center' tiles of dirt/grass/water using your MeshRenderer system & UV00/UV11 to select sprites. I've thought about looping over it again with a SmoothMap() method, checking every tiles neighbours and seeing if they are a different tile from itself. Thats about as far as i've got... I'm not sure without writing tons of if statements how to detect when to replace the tile with a corner/side piece etc...

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Hey Dude, Thanks to your assistance I got it working, I have multiple layering tilemaps, all with rules for each joining tile on the edges etc. Its working great! I have another issue now though. I have been working on a 100*100 grid as I sorted this out, its perfect on that, but now when i changed to 200*200 for example, it seems like only the height is increasing and the width is still 100, anyway thats my assumption. The sprites look all squished and bizarre.

If you don't enable filtering and don't enable mip maps then yeah it will be pixel perfect, but that method is only suitable for pixel art games where the sprite size doesn't change. If you have non-pixel art or zoom in/out then you really need that padding.

You could add BoxCollider2D's to each tile and combine them with a Composite Collider That's exactly what the built-in Tilemap does

Check how you are creating the mesh for each grid position, maybe you're using half the cellSize

@@CodeMonkeyUnity/videos In the method call for adding the quad, the position is set to [grid.GetWorldPosition(x, y) + quadSize * 0.5f] (without the brackets) but if I remove the * 0.5f from the end it makes it worse. This is exactly how it is in the video, though, so I don't know why it's different for me. It worked before I tried converting it into the tilemap visual object, so I don't understand why it's not working now. also, thanks for the quick reply. You're always good for that.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Okay so if I set the cell size to 1 when I'm creating the tilemap, the gap disappears, but the visual is still half a cell width up and to the left of the cells I click on.

What part of the video are you referring to? The Grid class? That was made in the previous video unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=waEsGu--9P8

​@Code Monkey I reviewed the video and the solution is that Grid creating GridNodes is a 2D-array in final form C# is new for me and I never seen 2D-arrays before, but now its clear) Thank you!

The official Unity Tilemap uses the Composite Collider component which lets you build a collider shape from various other shapes like BoxColliders. So in their implementation they add a BoxCollider to each tile which then is used by the Composite Collider.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thanks for the answer! I've looked into the Composite Collider and it seems to be a great solution! Looks like I need create BoxCollider2D's at the tile positions and it will all be handled by this thing. BUT I don't know if it's okay to have around a 1000 BoxCollider2D elements at the same time. It might have an impact on performance. (Talking about small tiles like in Duck Game, Terraria, Starbound, ...). It would probably be a good idea to create one BoxCollider2D for multiple tiles in a row as a way to optimize it.

I made it so that Unity generates all the BoxColliders when grid's loaded. Then I can just enable/disable them. Would need to change them for non-square shaped tiles though... This approach makes the game fly when you're setting regular square-shaped tiles. But it makes the game lag when it needs to load a big grid.

I've had this same question for 4 hours

Don't do that, it will break when you make a build or just change something in the editor that causes the InstanceID to regenerate. Instead save something like an Enum, then in your code you know which Enum represents which Sprite Or simply ask yourself do you need to save the Sprite at all? Perhaps it's part of something else. For example in my upcoming game Dinky Guardians I don't save a Prefab reference for the Dinky objects, instead I just save the dinky save data in a save data list, then when loading I already know it's a Dinky so I spawn the Dinky prefab

@@CodeMonkeyUnity thanks, I guess I will try a different approach. I wanted to load the sprite, then get the terrain reference from the sprite, since one terrain "Road" may have many different visuals, different sprites. I will try making enum for sprite to see if it works. Thanks for your advice.

Not sure what you mean by that, your pathfinding logic should be separate from whatever you use for visuals, I covered pathfinding here unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=alU04hvz6L4 Which you could then combine with this tilemap Or you can look at how I did it in my TBS game unitycodemonkey.com/video.php?v=QDr_pjzedv0

Doesn't sound like a problem, just move your camera

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thanks for your response, I fix the problem. I have another question. I wonder why use Mesh in a 2D game and why not just use sprite and spriteRenderer?

A SpriteRenderer is a mesh, it's a flat quad, it just has a different name. You can put your Scene view into Wireframe mode to see the SpriteRenderer mesh

The mesh limit is 65k vertices so 100x100 should work with 40k vertices

​@@CodeMonkeyUnity 100x100 works fine, but above around 140~ the tiles start to look distorted/stretched/squished.... is this the point where I need to do chunking of 100*100 grids?

@@pepsipwns666 140x140 requires 78k vertices which is above the 65k limit so yes at that point you need to handle multiple chunks

You mean store extra metadata in each Tilemap cell? I haven't used it much so not sure but maybe you can use tilemap.SetTile(); and make a custom class that extends TileBase

​@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thanks for putting me on the right track! Managed to find a solution for it! :)

There's a link in the description to download the project files

@@CodeMonkeyUnity My bad. Thank you soooo much!

Add some Debug.Log to see what your code is doing. Is the code testing for Input running? Is SetTilemapSprite(); being called? Does it have the correct world position? Is the event being fired and then updating the visual?

Thanks for the reply! I actually realized that it was because I forgot to put "girdValueUV" in the "AddToMeshArrays" constructor at the end of "UpdateXMapVisual"@@CodeMonkeyUnity

Thanks for the reply, turns out I forgot to swap "gridValueUV" into the "AddToMeshArrays" constructor@@CodeMonkeyUnity

You have the save file stored, how you share that depends on what kind of server infrastructure you have.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity thanks for your reply. As an expert can u recommend what should I use in this particular situation (Just to share save files). I didnt find any useful information on internet.

Not sure what you mean by 3D, this is a flat mesh you can orient it in any way

The grid system is a bit complex so it depends on just how much of a beginner you are. If you're a beginner in Unity but not in C# you should be able to follow it. Check the playlist: ru-vid.com/group/PLzDRvYVwl53uhO8yhqxcyjDImRjO9W722

I'm late, but to the others wondering the same: use Unity's built-in Tilemap Editor. As Code Monkey said, you likely don't - and _shouldn't_ - need more, as a beginner. It's a bit like, "If you need to ask [the price], you can't afford it." If you need to ask whether you can make this, you probably can't.

are you talking about horizontal scroller map? then put 3 grids side by side and slide them past the camera and when the left is off screen move the grid to the right side

Sure, if they both use the same underlying grid then its very simple to make a tile for a rock and make it unwalkable on the pathfinding grid

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Should I directly set the walkability (this is a word?) of the Path Node in the method of changing the sprite of the tile (this I know how to do), or would it be more optimal to add the walkability method to the Trigger Grid Object Changed event (this I don't)?

@@umarmohd3511 You should probably keep the Visual and Logic separate and have another script that listens to visual changes and applies path changes.

What part of your texture is yellow? Sounds like a UV issue, add some Debug.Log's to see what UV's you're using.

If its just rotated then you can leave the grid as rectangular and just move the camera. Otherwise you just have to do some math

@@CodeMonkeyUnity the sprites are rotated (actually drawn isometrically )

@@CodeMonkeyUnity I'd like to second this question. I've been able to convert your grid class to handle isometric so far, tile picking is done, but the rendering is always bottom left to top right, instead of lowest y always on top. Any ideas? I asked in discord and CPU thought it was a uv problem, and I tried all his suggestions, nothing affects the way the mesh is drawn so far.

You mean the gaps? That's not being off by one pixel, it's just the automatic scaling of the texture. If the tile next to it is transparent that can happen. You can fix it by adding a tiny bit of padding on each tile texture.

@@CodeMonkeyUnity My textures where off by a pixel, I could see one pixel the previous texture in the atlas but only on certain columns. Im also using my own textures so that could be an issue but my current theory is a rounding error maybe.

I had the same problem. They were off by one pixel. The pixel count starts at 0, so the 64th pixel is pixel 63. Lower uv11Pixels.x by 1, e.g. 64 = 63, 128 = 127, 192 = 191 etc, etc.

Do you have the Grid class with generics? It was made in this video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8jrAWtI8RXg.html Based on the error it sounds like you're using the built-in Unity Grid class instead This video was made a long time ago so I don't remember what's in the package, you can download the project files for the video that I just released which also uses the tilemap ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-n-R-mg0Svlo.html

You should have as many classes as you need and no more. If something makes sense to be in its own class then it should be in its own class. Definitely don't put everything in one giant megaclass just because you want to avoid making more classes.

Feel free to pause as much as you need, remember this is your learning journey, you're not competing with anyone but yourself. So take your time and just focus on learning

Feel free to write your own Utilities or just write the specific function you need, there's nothing special about my particular utilities, it's just so I don't write the same code over and over again. Shame on me for giving you free education? Ok then

@@CodeMonkeyUnity I think packing shortcut functions in a class is a good way to save time and typing. Bravo!

Your SetGrid() function expects two arguments, a Tilemap and a Grid but you're only passing in a single grid parameter

@@CodeMonkeyUnity Thank you very much for your fast response. When i change it to: " public void SetTilemapVisual(TilemapVisual tilemapVisual) { TilemapVisual.SetGrid(Tilemap, Grid); } " I instead get the CS0119 error: "Tilemap"/"Grid