Selection Inspector for TilePlus tiles

Here’s an example of a Selection Inspector when displaying a TilePlus tile. This is used in Tile+Painter and as the Selection Inspector for the Tile+Brush.

The Basic Info section displays read-only information from the tile. This area changes depending on what type of tile is being inspected. The last two items on the first line are the state of the tile and the Instance ID.

The Toolbar is followed by fields and properties from the inspected tile, ordered by the tile’s class hierarchy. Each section is in a foldout.

The TilePlusBase foldout is always the bottom element and has some special functionality.

• Unlock Tile name: When unchecked, the tile’s name can be edited.
• Tile Sprite: controls visibility of the Tile’s sprite. This is handy if you just want to use the GameObject of the Tile and don’t want the sprite to appear on the Tilemap, but you want to see it in the Palette or Painter.
  • If this is set to ClearOnStart or ClearInSceneViewAndOnStart then the Tile’s sprite will be invisible when painted. You can still find it using Painter and change the setting directly.
• Lock Color and Lock Transform flags: change the flags setting on the Tilemap and the tile instance’s flags value.
• If you add a GameObject to the tile, the GameObject Runtime-only and Retain flags become visible.
• Collider override can be set to No Override, which means that the setting from the tile asset in the project folder is used. The other settings can be used to set the collider type on a per-tile basis. This action occurs during the execution of the tile’s GetTileData method.
• Tags: one or more comma-delimited tags. TpLib methods can be used to look for tagged tiles.
• Color: change the sprite color on the Tilemap and tile instance’s color value.
  • Not shown in this image since the LockColor flag is checked.
• The Position, Rotation, and Scale fields can be used to affect the transform of the sprite on the Tilemap and the tile instance’s transform value.
• Zone and Event support are advanced features that you can read about here.

Certain tiles use a built-in capability to inhibit the visibility of the Name, Collider, Tags, Color, and/or Transform sections of the foldout. For example, tiles such as TpAnimZoneLoader and TpAnimZoneSpawner modify the sprite transform as you adjust the zone size. These tiles hide the transform fields since the transform shouldn’t be modified by humans.

To be clear, when acting on TilePlus tiles, the actions of modifying flags, transform, or color in the Selection Inspector or Tile+Painter changes the corresponding value in the tile instance and on the parent Tilemap of the tile. When you save the scene, the changes in the tile are preserved. The original tile asset in the project folder is not affected. When acting on Unity tiles, only the Tilemap is affected.

In Tile+Painter, it’s easy to pick tiles from the scene and perform Color or transform modifications. Again, the only thing affected is the Tilemap. The asset in the project folder is not affected.

Tile+Painter also has a bulk modification feature: you can select an area of a Tilemap and apply changes to Color, transform, and tile Flags for all tiles in the selection.

Some tiles will display ► buttons in the inspected tile’s fields area. These invoke methods in the tile and are useful for testing your tiles, especially for TilePlus’ animated tiles.

When the Editor is in Play mode the display will change somewhat, as most of the information becomes read-only, and some additional data appears showing the state of the animation flags (introduced in 2022.2).

When looking at a TilePlus Tile asset in the Editor, you can change the Description and Info fields. These appear in the Basic Info section as shown above, and in the Brush Inspector. You may find these fields useful: one use would be prompts to remind you what the tile does before you paint it.