Hi All,
I was recently introduced to Unity through work, and decided to dive in to my own personal project at home.
I wanted to create a top-down style logistics game, but was immediately hampered by various quirks and issues with using tile based systems in Unity.
Mostly texturing issues relating to the fact Unity is actually 3D by nature (even in 2D mode), and by the performance of representing tiles as game objects (which seems to be a fairly standard approach).
There are some great tools out there like Tiled for static, RPG-style maps, but there didn’t seem to be any (or at least many) for big, dynamic maps.
So after spending days researching all the problems I had, I decided to put together a “comprehensive” guide to getting start with 2D tile mapping in Unity:
http://matthewlynch.net/2017/02/19/efficient-artefact-free-2d-tile-mapping-in-unity-5-5/
This tutorial covers everything from using a mesh to represent your tiles more efficiently, through to preparing you textures so that they don’t bleed or have strange artefacts during movement.
It has a moving camera that supports zooming, and also covers how to convert clicks in to tile coordinates (actually pretty easy when you use Unity correctly).
I would love to get some feedback on what parts of the tutorial are useful, and which parts could be done better.
If people do find it useful, I will keep writing more as I go through the journey of making a game.
Cheers,
Matt