Ways to handle seasonal tilesets?

Unity Engine
1

Hi

In my game I want to have there be different seasons, with the image the tilemap uses changing so I can have the ground be snowy in the winter, or the grass be a little dryer in the fall (My game is a 2d topdown game and I’m using Unity’s built in tilemap features to handle my world.)

I already know how to handle this with normal objects (I’d probably use an array to store the different sprites then just change which one is used as each season event fires,), but I can’t seem to wrap my head around how to do this with my tilemap.

I could just have separate scenes for each season, but that feels like a pretty brute-force workaround that would create a lot of work down-the-line as I continue to develop and grow my world. I also considered seeing if I could attach a script to each tile that handles this, but I have a lot of different tiles that make up my game and I feel like having that many extra components would seriously slow down my game, not to mention the grind it would be to setup all the scripts.

What other ways are there to handle this? If it helps all of the tiles I’d want to change are contained in a single tile pallette. I’m sure the solution is probably quite obvious, but I’ve only been using Unity for about 4 months now and am still missing a lot of knowledge.

2

If your sprites are using the same material, you could just use something like .sharedMaterial.SetTexture("_MainTex", seasonTexture) and all 1000 objects or whatever that use the material will instantly be using the new texture. The texture coordinates per sprite would remain the same so you would just have to make sure the corresponding sprite for each season is within the same region of each sheet.

2 Likes
3

This sounds like exactly what I was hoping for. I have 4 spritesheets, one for each season, but other than being colored different per season everything else is the same.

I would use this by doing something like

Material terrain;
Sprite summerTex;
terrain.sharedMaterial.SetTexture("_MainTex",summerTex");

and if I run something similar to that my tilemaps should all update throughout all my scenes?

I feel sort of dumb for not thinking of this but I really appreciate your help!

1 Like
4

Texture summerTex; …also, do confirm that “_MainTex” is actually the name of the main texture for your shader. You could also try terrain.sharedMaterial.mainTexture = summerTex;