What's the plan for shadow caster 2d and tilemaps?

[TheNightglow]

I would love if one could simply add some shadow caster component to a tilemap with a TilemapCollider2D or CompositeCollider2D, and than that collider gets already recognized for the shadow generation

with this:

Script for generating ShadowCaster2Ds for Tilemaps

Hi everybody, Since I did not find any built-in functionality to make shadow casters fit in the shape of the tilemaps (something that I think it is fundamental) I made my own script to achieve such thing without having to manually create and adjust every shadow caster. Just add the script to your project and you will see a new option in the top menu of the editor. Once you execute it, shadow casters will be created for all the tilemaps in the open scene. It requires that the tilemaps have Co…

you can generate shadow casters for all open tilemaps in scene that have CompositeCollider2D using a button in the UI

that works aswell but is a bit less intuitive then simply marking the shadow casting objects and have anything beyond that automatic

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something I noticed when setting up a top down scene with 2D shadows, is that certain objects are not really supposed to cast shadows in every direction…
and different objects should have a different shadow length

for instance for a cliff wall, shadows should act differently whether the light is on top of the cliff, or below

here a quick example:
Light below cliff:

light above cliff:

for the first image, it is fine that everything above the cliff is shadowed, since the light would not reach there with the source being below
for the second image, it would be nicer if the rocks either dont cast a shadow at all, or one that has a smaller length, as in only the area close to the rocks being shadowed

I really dont know how something like this would be best presented to the user, since the shadow direction and length would need to be part of the tile info, generating a shadow caster from collider alone would no longer be enough…

maybe this info could be defined in Rule Tiles, with each rule having an advanced definition option to declare which direction casts which length of shadows?

beyond that, just shadow length in general would be appreciated, makes no sense for a tree and a bush to have shadows of the same length (while right now, I think every 2D shadow caster always has an infinite length)