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Infrastructure

Review

Bundle: an archive of all the tiles and Prefabs for a single Tilemap. TileFab: references a group of Bundles.

Let’s review what type of data are in a Bundle asset:

  • A List of TilePlus Tiles.
  • A List of Unity Tiles.
  • A List of Prefabs.
  • Indexed Lists of Tile Flags, transforms, and Colors.
  • The BoundsInt for the group of tiles as calculated for TileFabs or Chunks.

It’s not difficult at all to take all this information and populate a Tilemap with the tiles in the Bundle. Even a caveman could do it! There’s a method in the Bundle asset called TileSet which unpacks the various Lists in the asset and returns a List of data items, each with the tile reference and Flags, transforms, and Color for each tile. Methods in TileFabLib and TpZoneManager provide higher-level APIs for both TileFab and Chunk use.

Caching

Bundle assets cache all non-TilePlus tiles the first time that the TileSet method is used. This increases performance when the same Bundle is used repeatedly and most of the tiles are ‘normal’ Unity tiles (basically, anything that isn’t a TilePlus tile). There is a method that clears the cache if you need to.

Chunkifying

Bundle assets can also subdivide themselves into square chunks of arbitrary size. For example, a 1024 x 1024 Bundle can be divided into smaller chunks ranging from 4 x 4 (65K smaller chunks) to 256 x 256 (4 smaller chunks). After this operation, the Bundle turns this information into data ready to be loaded to Tilemaps using their block move methods. This cache can also be released when no longer needed.

This is the method used by the Layout system, and provides a way to set the loading chunk size at runtime. In other words, you can optimize the system at runtime based on the capabilities of the target system.

Prefab Caching

Prefabs are never cached since they must be instantiated each time they are placed.

HOWEVER if a prefab has a TpSpawnLink component (or a derived component) then the Spawner Service is used. If the same prefab is used again, it's pooled and not repeatedly instantiated.

Software Components

Support for TileFabs comprises TileFabLib, TpZoneManager, and TpZoneLayout. Each of the three components present successively higher-level APIs for using TileFabs.

TileFabLib is a static library which provides the basic functions for loading TileFabs and Bundles to Tilemaps in a scene, during Editor sessions and at runtime. For example, if you’d created a TileFab from a complex scene with 10 layers of Tilemaps comprising thousands of tiles, you can paint that TileFab to a Scene using Tile+Painter, or load it to a Scene in a running app. It’s also used to create TpZoneManager instances at runtime.

TpZoneManager is a Chunk Manager. Instances of TpZoneManager Scriptable Objects are created at runtime. It has an API for chunk management, and loading/unloading chunks.

TpZoneLayout is a MonoBehaviour component that queries a single TpZoneManager instance: it’s a base-class for loading and unloading chunks as they move in and out of the Camera range. This is a basic implementation, and TpZoneLayout can be subclassed or rewritten by you to work differently if you want.

See the Side-Scroll layout demo for an example of how to use the ZoneLayout component directly: it's pretty easy.

At a higher level, ChunkedZoneSelectors, TpSceneManager, and TpSceneList assets can be used to organize TileFabs into TileScenes which can be loaded and unloaded in their entirety without loading or additively loading a Unity scene.

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