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, resolves its tiles from the painted terrain, and casts the shadows.

Collision

• The tileset marks solid tiles. A tile_collision component builds one parry voxel shape from them.
• 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. The collider is rebuilt once on the next fixed step, however many cells changed.

Autotiling

A painted terrain resolves through 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. 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. A map resolves the same on every machine and after every reload.
• kind = "sides" or "corners_and_sides" writes the rules for a bitmask sheet, the layout Godot and Tiled use.
• kind = "quarters" draws a cell as four quarters, each chosen by the two cells beside that corner and the one across it. Five tiles cover all 47 neighbourhoods (an RPG-Maker-A2 sheet). A sheet whose five are not consecutive names them: quarters = [fill, horizontal, vertical, outer, inner].

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. Fifty tiles cast one shadow.

Cells and layouts

• Cell 0,0 has its top-left corner on the node. The map keeps an origin; 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, pick, and a stamp of the selected tile with the ones right of and below it.
• A terrain brush that runs through the engine's own resolver.
• A Set panel that writes solid, one-way or occluder back to the tileset file.

Importing from Tiled and LDtk

balaur import level.tmx --project game
balaur import world.ldtk --project game

Writes the atlas, a tileset per sheet (grid, spacing, margin, per-tile collision, animations) and a scene for the level: one root named after the map, one tilemap node per tile layer under it.

An .ldtk project writes a scene per level. Its entities become nodes under that root, each carrying its fields.

A level too big for a scene keeps its rows in a .cells file that cells names. tilemap, tileset and tile_collision are in the reference.