Entry 11 - Katt Viteză and the Tilemap Conspiracy
A reflection on the rabbit hole I fell into looking for answers on custom tiles and tilebrushes.
As I was working on the new movement script for Katt this past week, I came across an issue: I wanted Katt to stand at an angle appropriate to the surface she’s standing on. (For example, her sprite would be tilted 45 degrees while standing on a 45 degree slope.) How could I get her to do this?
Around the same time I was working on adding a tilemap to my scene, where I could load in a tilesheet of sprites and paint the tiles onto the scene. The tilesheet I used can be seen below.
The test tilesheet I’m using to layout the test level.
Scriptable Objects
When I read in the Sonic Physics Guide that each tile in the Sonic games has a height value associated with it, I sought a way to set an angle value for each tile displaying a sloped surface. Katt would then read the angle value of the tile she stepped on and tilt to that corresponding angle. I wondered how I could apply values to built-in objects like Tiles, from research online I came across “Scriptable Objects” in Unity. These are data containers you can apply variables to, regardless of classes. You can create them as a custom asset and apply them to elements like tiles and brushes, or other objects you couldn’t customise otherwise in Unity. I created my own ScriptableObject I called “AngleTile”, simply so that the tiles in my tilesheet could hold an angle value.
Scriptable objects were a concept I hadn’t heard of before in Unity, so throughout the week I spent time watching Unity lectures and other informative videos on the subject.
Here are some of the videos I watched:
- Live Training 16th February 2016 - Introduction to Scriptable Objects
- Creating Your First Scriptable Brush and Scriptable Tile
- Unity 2D Preview Tilemap Tutorial - Scriptable Tile and Tilebrush
After watching these videos I still wasn’t entirely clear on how I could tell Unity I wanted to generate a tilemap made up of my own custom AngleTiles. Despite watching them thoroughly and re-watching at points, the videos never seemed to explicitly state how to generate a custom tilemap, the demonstators always seemed to have their custom tilemaps at the ready beforehand. I figured that a good option might be to install Unity’s “2D Extras” into the project. These extras are found on GitHub (mentioned in the second video listed above).
After installing the custom tiles and brushes into the project and looking at their scripts I found no further clarity on my question unfortunately, so I decided to pose said question on Unity Answers and see if anyone else could assist.
The question I posed on Unity Answers, will someone know the answer?
Here’s hoping I can get some clarification on this issue, it’s quite an obscure one, throughout the week I felt like I was getting to the bottom of some conspiracy. That’s all for this week, wish me luck in finding my answer!
‘Til next time!
