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Workflow

You probably work with Tilemaps which are included in a scene rather than Tilemaps loaded from a prefab.

This is the easiest way to use TilePlus tiles: just paint and edit them to do what you want.

Saved with a Scene

When you paint a TPT tile it’s saved with the scene and will be present in a build.

  • The TPT tile in the scene is not affected by changes to the asset in the Project folder.
  • The asset in the Project folder is not affected by changes to the tile in the scene.

If you paint over the TPT tile, it’s deleted from the scene and will no longer be saved. Essentially, the TPT tile becomes like any other Object in the scene.

Once you edit the painted TPT tile in-scene you can save it as a new tile asset, drag that into the palette or Painter’s Favorites list, and paint it. This is especially useful when prototyping or for creating backups.

This is the easiest way to make the most of this new type of tile. Remaining in the scene, you can have references to Scene Objects like GameObjects, Components, etc. in your tile scripts. Once a tile is painted, you can select it with the Palette, edit it in the Tile+Brush Selection Inspector or Tile+Painter, and drag references such as GameObjects into the painted TPT tile fields. Think of it as a Tile promoted to a GameObject, just without a Transform component. That’s close enough for rock and roll.

Scene References

When a TPT tile is in the Scene, it can have references to other Objects in the Scene. For example, you can have a reference to a GameObject and access its components for scripting, right within the TPT tile’s code if you like.

BUT: maybe you want to make prefabs out of Tilemaps and load them while your game is running.

If so, you may find this system annoying. There is a limited facility to save Tilemaps as Prefabs as explained in the next section. However, it’s way more efficient to use the TileFab system. Tilefabs allow preserving one or more Tilemaps and any child prefabs into a position-independent archive format.

TileFabs are the key technology component underlying the TilePlus layout system, which streams chunks of tiles in and out of the scene as the Camera moves.

Tilemaps saved in Prefabs

When you create a prefab by dragging a Grid with child Tilemaps to the Project folder, all references to Objects in the Scene are lost just like any other Prefab that you might create.

This includes all TPT tiles. If you were to open the Prefab, the locations where TPT tiles had been placed would be replaced with pink or other oddly colored tiles.

Because of this, if you mouse-drag a Tilemap or any GameObject that has Tilemaps as child GameObjects into a project folder to create a prefab, and there are any TPT tiles, the system will warn you in the console and will unlink the items you dragged from when you created this prefab so that the scene Tilemaps won’t be corrupted.

You may as well delete the prefab that you created as it isn’t useful.

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