What Can I Do With It?

If all you were interested in was Tile+Painter, you’ll find it can do 90% of that the Unity Tilemap Editor (UTE) can do and many things that it can’t or doesn’t do. Read all about it in Tile+Painter User Guide.

Let’s talk about the new types of tiles.

One of the big limitations of Unity Tiles is that they’re basically templates and can’t store any data other than what’s already set up in the Tile class: generally, just Color, transform, Collider, GameObject, and so on. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But there’s no possibility of instance data: data specifically related to just one tile. There’s no Update method and no simple way to have timed functions like delays.

This means that actual functionality – doing something – can’t be done in a tile, or at least it’s more difficult than it needs to be.

TPT tiles work differently: but simply, TPT tiles are promoted from Project assets to Scene objects. When you save the Scene, the TPT tiles are saved along with everything else in the Scene, along with any data in the tile.

TPT is based on new Tile asset classes and a support library. Unlike normal tiles, modifying fields after painting does not alter the original tile asset. This opens new possibilities for working with tiles and requires no changes to the standard Tilemap system. No modifying Scene files; none of that. Just code.

The sample tiles included with TPT add much more flexible animation capabilities, tiles with trigger zones for spawning prefabs (built-in pooling) or tiles, tiles with trigger zones that work with custom coding to load new sections of your tilemap, and more.

These tiles can have references to GameObjects, components, asset files, and so on.

At a higher level, TPT can bundle portions of, or entire Tilemaps into custom Assets and Prefabs. These can be painted directly on Tilemaps, dynamically loaded at runtime, and much more.

Caveat

As you may already know, UnityEngine.Objects in Unity Scenes can’t be referred to by a Prefab. So, if you drag one or more Tilemaps into a prefab then TPT tiles will, in technical terms, get all messed up.

No worries though, there’s a Tools/TilePlus menu function that lets you create compatible Prefabs of single or multiple Tilemaps at once. However, saving your Tilemaps inside Scenes is the most flexible workflow and “just works.”

Even if you want to use load one or more Tilemaps as Prefabs, the flexibility of these new Tile types can be extremely useful, even with the workflow changes. But it’s possible to re-think the organization of a project and not use Tilemap prefabs at all.

You might also explore the TileFab archiving system: save Tilemaps in an asset and load whenever and wherever you want.

Check out the Workflow section for more information.

The FAQs section at the end of this document may have answers to some of your questions.

Required Unity Version

Unity6 or newer is required. Earlier versions are no longer supported.