Tile maps

A tilemap node draws a grid of cells over a tileset. The tileset says what each tile is: solid, one-way, animated, light-blocking. The map builds the collider, picks its tiles from the terrain you paint, and casts the shadows.

Collision

The tileset marks solid tiles, and a tile_collision component on the map builds one parry voxel shape from them, not a row of boxes. A body sliding along a wall has no seam to catch on. Slopes are polygons in tile pixels; one_way = true makes a platform.

[tiles.0]
collision = "full"

[tiles.7]
collision = [[[0, 16], [16, 16], [16, 8]]]   # a slope, in tile pixels
one_way = true

set_cell marks the map, and the collider is rebuilt once on the next fixed step however many cells changed.

Autotiling

Paint a terrain and the tiles arrange themselves. Underneath is one table of [[rules]], read in order; the first match wins.

[[rules]]
terrain = "grass"
pattern = ["?#?",     # ? any   # this terrain   . anything else
           "?#.",
           "?##"]
tile = 12
transforms = ["rotate", "mirror"]
outside = "same"

• transforms lets one rule cover eight orientations, so a 47-tile blob is a dozen rules.
• outside says whether the edge of the map counts as the same terrain.
• Variation is hashed from the cell's coordinate, so a map resolves the same on every machine and after every reload.
• mode = "sides" or "corners_and_sides" writes the rules for a bitmask sheet, the layout Godot and Tiled use.

Animated and occluding tiles

[tiles.14]
animation = { frames = [14, 15, 16], fps = 8 }

[tiles.3]
occluder = true

Animation runs on the frame clock, outside the digest. An occluding cell feeds the 2D light map only its exposed edges, so fifty tiles cast one shadow.

Cells and layouts

• Cell 0,0 has its top-left corner on the node, and the map keeps an origin, so painting reaches in every direction.
• layout = "isometric" or "hex" on the tileset. Mesh, collider, picking and the painter share one placement function.

The Tiles dock

Paint, rectangle, fill, line and pick; a terrain brush that runs through the engine's own resolver; and a Set panel that writes solid, one-way or occluder back to the tileset file.

Importing from Tiled

balaur import level.tmx --project game

Writes the atlas, a tileset per sheet with its grid, spacing, margin, per-tile collision and animations, and a scene with one tilemap node per tile layer.

Not yet: quarter-tile sheets, LDtk import, cells in their own chunked file, and a multi-tile stamp. They are on the roadmap. tilemap, tileset and tile_collision are in the reference.