hello ladies and gentlemen. It's Mike here at game from scratch. And with the move to gdau 4.x from gdau 3, one of the casualties, I would say, was tile map support. The old tile mapping was honestly a bit better, although it is improved from gdau 4 to 4.3. But one major thing that happened with gdau 4.3, which is currently available in beta, is tile maps are now dead, as I'm going to illustrate to you as we create this new project. So let's create a new gdo project, and I will show you exactly what I'm talking about. Now they're dead because they've refactored how things work. There is a new object in place here, and I do think the new system is more logical. There are some compromises they had to make to make it work. But before, if you were using tile maps, you used to have to do something like this. So here we are in our world. Now, first off, we're going to

need some tiles to do this. I'm just going to use uh it's a Humble Bundle. I didn't actually cover uh the link will be down below if you want to go ahead and check it out uh but this guy right here so we'll go extract those out to this folder and we're just going to bring in some of these tile sets. A tile set is generally either a collection of images small images but generally they're pushed together into something called an atlas as we will see right here so there's a variety of them. We can see them in like the thumbnail view exactly what we are dealing with here so it's a bunch of Sprites packed together um and what we're going to do is we're going to just take these guys and import it in so this guy will just grab everything like so uh we'll open up our project so open in file manager uh make a new directory here called tiles like this and paste all right so we have a number ofes to work with now the way

it used to previously work. Is you would create a tile map. Now, tile map was a little bit of a messy structure. It didn't really mesh with a lot of the other things that, uh, you did when working in gdau. The structure was a little strange. There were some weird relationships between it and child objects it worked with, uh, but you see here, it was child map. And the reason why it's dead is this guy right here. It's actually another dword deprecated. So, basically, this means you could still use it, but it is never going to get any more updates. Instead, what you're now supposed to use is tile map layers. So, that is each layer, or think of it basically as a stack of tiles on top of each other. Um, you, you do each individual layer. Now, so I'm going to do is create just an empty node like so, uh, and we're going to call this one, um, my map. Now, this is completely optional. You don't need to have a parent node, but it does make sense to me, kind of gives you that.

hierarchy that you used to have with tile Maps before. And now, what you do is create a tile map layer. And your tile map layer is more or less what you would often do is have them stack on top of each other. So, the thing at the bottom draw or are drawn on by the things above them or drawn on by the things above them. So, it makes a lot of sense for the bottom tile layer to be, uh, say ground, uh, and then on top of that, uh, we might do, um, another tile layer like so, uh, and we will call this one, uh, buildings spelled wrong. And then we'll do another tile layer, same thing like so, and then this one we will call props. So, this is the new structure that you would use now. For each one of these, what you have to do is set set up a tile set for it. This is the part that I find kind of irritating 'cause the tile sets are not shared across. So, you need to kind of duplicate your work here. So, go ahead, you create a new tile.

set here our tiles are actually 48x48 pixels just because of the way that the tiles in this particular bundle worked. And then once you've done that, so you come down here you're in tile map mode. Now what you want to do is come in here and create your new tile set. So that is done by basically coming in here and say add an atlas. Go into our tiles and pick the atlas we want. So we could do, by the way, you can shift collect, you can add a bunch of these in. This is the ground though, so I just want like the ones that look ground is like. And we're going to go ahead and add those in. It will create our tile sets. It will automatically create them based off the spacing that we gave. So this is using 48x48 pixel squares. If you need to change that, you can do that. If you've got spacing between the tiles, you can set it here. But now you've got this tile set ready to go. By the way, there's

a little icon over here. You can zoom out to show the um, to fit the tiles as best as possible in. It doesn't go all the way if there's a weird aspect r like what we have right here, and that is our basic layer. So let's say I want to go ahead and draw some grass. I go ahead, I can select a tile. Now, this is a user interface thing I find very I trip up on it all the time. To actually paint, you leave the tile set section, and you go over to tile map. So then what I do is I'll come here, and you'll see it grows dynamically as I move. And I'm not going to do anything great artwork wise today, but I'll just give you an idea of how these things work. So we'll just go around and we'll paint in our tile maps. Now that we've done all that, we'll do a flood fill and paint them in. So now we have our ground layer. Obviously, you could uh, mix it up, use different tiles as you would.

just did a paint we can do different tiles Edge out the corners if you wish so if you want to do an individual tile we go in here to draw mode pick our corner and then we could do draw right there on top of that You' also have the ability to rotate or flip tiles you can mirror them this way so if I want to use the same tile over here I could do it that way as well so you got your tile placement and all your drawing tools are available over here in tile map and then tile set this is where you compose them now it is a little confusing that there is a p paint option over here um you I don't know why that's there you think that you'd select something and then paint with it but no to paint you go over to tile map so that is how the initial work now next up you have uh another layer so here we've got for example buildings now the setup problem with this is you need to do the same thing over again and there's uh so I got

again, a new tile set. Again, I set it to 48x48 like so, and I'm not going to get into all this other stuff about, you know, path finding and so on. Uh, we just go ahead and create that. You can create a tile set here, but it's easier, basically, to just come on over here and do it. Click the plus, grab an atlas, and here we're doing, uh, buildings. I'm not really sure what I'm going to go with, so I'll just shift-click a couple of these. Um, all right, assume that those are buildings. I have no idea if they are or aren't, but you get an idea. These are going to draw on top of our other things. Go in, create them again. You click this little guy to zoom in around. So let's say we want to add this little pergola thing over again. I always try and draw from the tile set. Set. I got to go over to tile map. Uh, that part again from the UI I find a little bit confusing, but basically you could start pasting things.

in like so, we also have our trees, etc., in this layer as well. This will be on the same layer as a building, so if I do this over the building, it will literally replace the building. So that's why you have these multiple layers, by the way. And then next up, we've got props, exact same deal. Go ahead, create the tile set. So you're going to have to create a tile set for every single layer. This is something that is definitely different than the way tile map used to work. So that's done. Go over here again, create your Atlas. But as you can see from this workflow, it is pretty fast. I'm just going to go ahead and grab a couple of these things for prop layers. All right, we'll assume all those things are props and automatically generate them. So here we go. Let's pick a different tile set over here and let's do a crane digger. All right, so here we go again. I'm doing it again. All right, so we move over here, select the tiles.

that you wish to use. Obviously, you can do a multi-select like so and then paint. Now, what you'll notice here is this layer is drawing over top of that layer. Now, if I go ahead and we move this back up, oh, it's order of creation. So, it will... No, it doesn't. So, here you can see the order that they show up. Here is the order in which they're rendered, Z order. So, the things at the bottom, you want to put them at the very top. You'll also notice as I am switching through these, it is focusing the layer that I have selected. If I move away, it shows us all of the options. Now, another thing here is, so what you had before when you had tile maps is you had everything kind of organized into one spot. So, navigating between your tile layers was all done via the tile map. But now that they're separate objects, there is a bit of a hack here for moving between them. So, if you want to use all layers, you select it right here. So basically, you're going

to see all the tiles now you can't really do much with that because of the way that it's set up. But so you can select all layers that way, and you can navigate between the available layers, uh, this way, so you can kind of get the sameish experience you had before, uh, but it is now this much more. I think it's more streamlined, I think it's easier to work with, but there are definitely some flaws like constantly recreating the same damn sets of tile Maps. I don't know if there is a workaround for that. If you could save a tile map out as a res or tile set out as a resource and then reload it that way, uh, but I don't see an option for actually loading it. So I might be user error here, uh, but I don't see a way to actually reshare a tile set between tile layers, and that's the only thing I'm really finding missing from this setup. And obviously, this is going to have ramifications for the, uh, API that's used. Um, so again, you can still

use tile map. Tile map is still in here. Uh, so if I wanted to go ahead, I can go ahead and create a tile map like so. But just be aware, uh, it is deprecated, so it's not technically dead, but it's dead as far as development goes. You're not going to get new features for tile map. So the new way of doing things. So again, tile maps shared tile sets across the entire map, and then you created layers for them. Now you have separate layers, each with their own tile set. There's advantages to both. I find the new design cleaner, but the lack of ability to share tile sets, at least I don't know how to do it, that seems to be the glaring missing thing here. So, ladies and gentlemen, that is it. Tile maps are dead. Long Live tile layers. Let me know what you think of this change of tile map support in general, and you'd like to see a more in-depth tutorial. I could go into like what the rest of this stuff does, like these things over here, navigation and uh, custom data layers and

physics layers maybe get into animating tiles um and using the API Etc. If you're interested in that coverage, do let me know, and maybe I'll follow it up at some point in the future. Uh, so if you're interested, by the way, everything we saw here, this was using uh 4. So this is 4.3 beta 1. 4.3 should be out probably next month, uh, maybe this month, but I doubt it. And one of the big things here again is this tile map change. So uh, it is featured down here. I thought it was more close to the top, but uh, apparently I was wrong or I skipped over it. There we go. So this is the big update here: tile map layers as nodes. So tile map is basically deprecated. To map layers replace it. To map layers are a more straightforward design, uh, but I can understand why some people will be frustrated about the change. I can understand why other people really like the change, and it is going to break your code. So one of those things to know if you're using tile Maps.

now and you want to switch over to tile layers you're going to have to port your code, of course. Since it's still in there but deprecated, your old code will continue to work, but the tooling is not going to get updated. And by the way, if you want to go ahead and use the tiles that I used in this one, I didn't cover this actual bundle and it's not allowed for very much longer. It's only going to be alive for four more days. But there is the game dev Marketplace RPG Adventure Essentials is where I actually got this from. What we looked at was the Urban modern. So all the tile sets came from here. They're basically designed for RPG Maker, but as you saw, they work perfectly fine in GDevelop. So if you're looking for some graphics, this is an option for you. A bunch of 2D graphics from game dev Marketplace, mostly around RPG style games. And yeah, if you want to go ahead, check that out. It is in the link down below, and it will

help support game from scratch. So, ladies and gentlemen, that is it. The new tile map. Uh, so tile maps are dead. Tile map layers are the new way forward. Let me know what you think of this change, and I will talk to you later. Goodbye.

Godot Tile Maps Are Dead ...Long Live TileMapLayers

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