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. 