Autotile enables placing sprites that are connected and share the same source texture. Autotile will figure out how large pieces can be used and repeats short pieces if necessary. When moving a connected tile, all its neighbours will rescale accordingly.
Powerful
Autotiles can serve as borders. Each tile can be marked as left-facing, up-facing etc. and will then use the specific texture that fits the situation.
There are two kinds of assets in Autotile: Connectable tiles and animated tiles.
Connected tiles are made for typical level-building requirements. These can be used to define structure that is connected in square angles. Scaling and moving of these textures will handle as much of the job for you as possible.
Animated tiles allows you to create tiling animations, e.g. if you need to reuse a conveyor belt animation throughout your game. You can also use these tiles to create more liveliness around the other tiles in your game, or anywhere you need a tileable animation.
Proven
Autotile is being used in the production in the upcoming indie title Teslagrad (video). Still, Autotile was built with the Asset Store in mind from the beginning.
I used the autotile layout to create a menu system. It is nice since I can adjust the elements for different screens, and adjust them to fit different screen resolutions without problems with texture stretching.
Off to a good start I i went with it and used Autotlie for several more elements. Here I have added another element to the GUI without having to leave Unity to edit my art. I also set up the progress bars using Autotile. The blue filler is another gameobject visible to the opacity in the texture, but the bar itself is an autotile.
I wanted my dialog to have rounded corners, and I know I will be using the dialog bubbles in a lot of other screens too. I set that too up as an autotile, so now I can rescale the bubles whithout ruining the rounded corners with stretching.
All in all the tool made it simple for me to do rapid iterations.
Our company is currently working on a 2D project that involves 2D procedural terrain generation. We already have the procedural terrain generation up and running, and are looking to use autotiling to make the terrain more appetizing to the eye. Does AutoTile include an API that will allow us to use it’s functionality, or would we be forced to rework our code to make AutoTile work with it?
On a basic level all blocks in the level are based on a prefab of an empty game object /w sprite renderer 2D collider. The blocks are being instantiated and destroyed on demand as needed, as well as by the player and other entities. If we were to switch our block prefab to an autotile prefab, and continue generating them as is, will autotile connect the dots on its own? All blocks are the same exact size and line with each other perfectly. So if it won’t, is it easy to make this possible? Or is it impossible and/or a serious amount of recoding will be necessary?
For the blocks to connect, they need to be in the same parent transform.
It’s not hard to make them try to connect to eachother through code, but there’s not a documented API.
The source code is included.
I think there is a single function that is called every time the block sees 'Mouse Button Up", which causes all the connections to happen.
Autotile doesn’t actually use prefabs, but there’s lots of shortcuts for creating the basic blocks.
It sounds manageable. And for the price is not a huge risk to at least give it a try. Worst case scenario we keep the license for a future project. We may consider a purchase in the near future, thank you very much!
