Better Rule Tiles

16 min read

Getting started with the BRT Editor

To use the BRT editor, you first need to create a better rule tile container.

  • Go to the project window, right click, and navigate to Create/2D/Tiles/Better Rule Tile Container

After this is done, you can simply double click on the newly created container asset to open and edit it in the Better Rule Tiles Editor window.

The BRT Editor

The Better Rule Tiles Editor window is the place where the magic happens. When you open an editor window the first things you’ll see are:

Setting things up

The first thing you’ll want to do before making any rule tiles is to change the grid type. The default grid type is square, so if you want to work on square tiles, you’re all set. But if you want to use isometric or hexagonal tiles, you’ll have to change it first. This step is important because once you’ve exported your first tiles, you won’t be able to switch between grid types.

Once you’ve settled on the grid type, you can start importing sprites and creating tiles.

Adding sprites to the editor

To add sprites, you just simply drag and drop them from the project window to the editor. You can select one or multiple sprites. You can also import multiple textures at the same time, and all the sliced sprites in them will be added.

When you drag and drop sprites, they’ll get added in a square pattern, but if you drop in the sliced image, the sprites will keep their layout from the image.

Alternatively you can also drag the sprites directly to the sprite drawer or the sprite override settings window. This way you can add the sprites to the editor without needing to place the sprites somewhere and cluttering the grid with unused sprites.

Creating tiles

After you’ve added all of the sprites you want to use, you’ll also have to create tiles. Head to the tile drawer window inside the editor and click on the Add Tile button. This tile will represent the actual tile that will be generated, and the one that you’ll be able to place into your scene.

Once you got both your tiles and sprites, you can start drawing the tiling rules. The process is very similar to how you’d do it with a regular rule tile, except it is displayed a bit differently. Head to the tiling rule page to learn how to create tiling rules using the BRT Editor.

Exporting the rule tiles

Once you’ve created tiling rules in the BRT Editor, you can export it to use them inside your scenes. Just head to the export options window by clicking the rightmost button in the toolbar, and click on Generate Tiles.

Once the tiles are done, the asset will be highlighted in the Unity project window, and you’ll find the exported tiles within the container asset. You can now use these tiles as you’d use any other tile. Add them to a tile palette and you can start using them in your scenes.

Grid

The grid is the heart of the tool. This is where you place tiles and sprites to create tiling rules.

There are 3 different types of grids you can work in: Square, Isometric and Hexagonal, with the hexagonal grid having two variations: pointed topped and flat topped.

You can change the grid type in the export options window, which can be found in the most right side of the toolbar.

Info

It’s recommended to change the grid type before you start working on anything. After exporting the tiles you won’t be able to switch between incompatible grid types. You will still be able to switch between rectangular or isometric, but not to hexagonal.

Grid settings

You can further customize how the grid appears in the editor settings window. These options are especially useful if you’re using non-conventional sprites.

  • Cell size - Specifies how large should one cell be compared to the unit size. Only affects sprites.
  • Tile size - Specifies the size of the preview tiles inside the editor, compared to the unit size.
  • Sprite anchor - Anchoring position of the sprites, acts the same as the setting in the Tilemap component
  • Grid cell offset - Rendering offset for both sprites and tiles, specified in grid units.
  • Current zoom - The current zoom value of the editor.
  • Render small grid - This option decides whether the grid lines should keep rendering when zoomed out by a large amount. Setting this option to disabled will help seeing the tiles better when zoomed out, and will also help with performance as the grid won’t need to render a bunch of lines.
  • Zoom threshold - If the render small grid option is disabled, the grid will stop rendering when the current zoom amount goes below this value.

Tile drawer

The tile drawer is the place where you can create and select tiles to use. On top of that, this is also the place where you can see the currently selected tile or sprite which you can use to draw with the brush tool.

Tiles inside the editor represent the actual tiles which will be generated, and the ones that you’ll be able to place into your game.

To create a tile just simply click on the “Add Tile” button in the drawer. The settings of the tiles you create can be changed in the tile inspector window. When selecting a tile from the drawer which can be edited, the tile inspector will automatically show up in the bottom left corner of the editor window.

Rules

Inside the tile drawer, you’ll see a few default tiles, called rules. You will need to use these to create tiling rules that will determine how the tile will behave when placing it on the tilemap.

Info

When using a rule tile, it’ll check all neighboring positions and compare the rule there to the rule of that position. That tiling rule will be selected where all positions pass the rules.

You can read more about how rules work on the Tiling rule page.

These default rules are:

  • Delete - It’s a rule that removes every other rule or tile. This is the tile you need to use to erase tiles from the grid using the brush tool.
  • Empty - When this rule is placed, the rule passes if there’s no tile in this position.
  • Not same - When this rule is place, the rule passes if the tile at this position is not the same as the tile which is checking.
  • Any - This rule will pass if there’s any tile placed at this position.

Tile drawer options

In the editor settings window, you can change the following settings for the tile drawer:

  • Tile drawer size - this option changes the width of the tile drawer, the number specified is the amount of tiles visible at once in the drawer.

Sprite drawer

Located on the left side of the BRT Editor, the sprite drawer gives you easy access to all of the sprites you’ve added to the grid or to the drawer itself. It lets you select sprites without needing to pick them from the grid using the picker tool.

Adding sprites to the drawer

You can add sprites to the sprite drawer in different ways:

  • You can directly drag and drop sprites into the drawer. When adding sprites directly to the drawer you can select as many sprites or texture files as you want, all of them will be added to the drawer.
  • The second way is to drop them directly to the grid. Every sprite that’s on the grid will be automatically added to the drawer. When dropping sprites to the grid directly, you can select multiple sprites, but only one texture file. As described in the Adding sprites to the editor section.

When reopening the editor, all of the sprites that you’ve added to the sprite drawer will be remembered by default. This behavior can be changed by disabling the Save sprite drawer setting in the editor setings window. When disabled, only those sprites will be remembered which are placed down on the grid. Disabling this option can help if you’ve added a lot of sprites to the drawer and it takes a while to load.

Using the sprite drawer

Using the drawer is self explanatory, you just click a sprite in the drawer to select it. The selected sprite will be displayed on the left side of the tile drawer window. When picking a sprite, the brush tool will be selected automatically so you can start drawing immediately after picking a sprite.

You can also expand the window to show more sprites at once by clicking the small arrow in the top right corner of the window. With this button you can also collapse the window to its original size.

Sprite drawer settings

If you wish to customize the sprite drawer, the editor settings window contains a few settings to change the appearance of it.

  • Display size - Changes the size of the sprites in the sprite drawer.
  • Collapsed columns - Sets the amount of columns visible in the sprite drawer when collapsed.
  • Expanded columns - Specifies the amount of columns when the sprite drawer is expanded.
  • Clear sprite cache - All sprites used in the editor are cached to memory for efficiency, but those sprites stay in the cache even when you deleted them from the grid. This button will remove unused sprites from the cache.
  • Reimport sprites - Once sprites are cached, any changes made to them won’t be seen inside the BRT Editor until you reload the project. This button reimports all cached sprites so changes made to them will be visible.
  • Add all sprites - Finds all sprites in the asset database and adds it to the sprite cache.

The toolbar

The toolbar is the row of buttons and toggles on top of the BRT Editor where you can access everything you need to use this tool. It’s divided into sections by horizontal double lines, so the different types of tools are separated into different groups.

The toolbar groups from left to right are the following. On the left side of the toolbar:

Editor actions

This group contains buttons to perform common actions in the editor window. These actions are usually executed using keyboard shortcuts, but are available here as well.

  • Undo (Ctrl + Z) - Undoes your last action
  • Redo (Ctrl + Y) - Redoes your last action
  • Delete selection (Delete) - Deletes the area selected with the selection tool
  • Copy (Ctrl + C) - Copies the currently area selected with the selection tool to the clipboard
  • Paste (Ctrl + V) - Pastes the copied selection in. Pressing paste will show a preview of the area which you can move around with the move tool. After you’re ready to paste the selection in you can press Escape or switch tools to confirm the action. You can press Delete to cancel the action.

BRT Editor actions

This toolbar group contains buttons to perform actions specific to the BRT Editor. These also can be trigger by keyboard shortcuts.

Automation tools

The last group on the left side of the toolbar contains tools that can help you get things done faster.

Extras

This group contains miscellaneous buttons that do not fit in other groups.

Editor window toggles

In the next section you’ll see buttons that let you disable or enable floating windows inside the BRT Editor.

  • Sprite toggle group - Only one of these can be active at a time:

Settings group

This group of the toolbar contains various toggles to change how things are displayed on the grid.

  • Highlight modified cells - Highlight cells modified by the grid cell inspector with a flashing outline.
  • Show coordinates - Show the grid coordinates on the side of the editor.
  • Snap windows - Snap windows or allow them to be moved.
  • Hide sprites - Hides the sprites so you can see what tile is under them.
  • Editor settings dropdown - Opens the editor settings window where you can adjust more settings.

Export group

The last, and most important group on the toolbar is the export group, where you can open the export options window.

If the container asset you’re editing is using the tileset editor feature, then this is also the group where the button to switch between editors will appear.

Editor settings

The editor settings is the place where you can change the appearance and behavior of the BRT Editor and other windows inside it. These settings are separated into groups for better readability:

You can click on any of the links to read more about the specific options group. They are located under to their respective categories.

Export options

The export options contains every setting that’ll affect the output of the exported tiles, and is also the place when you can export them.

Grid type

This is the place where you can change the type of the grid. You can choose between square (which is the default one), isometric, and two types of hexagonal grids. This setting can be changed even if you already have tiles on the grid, but it’ll relocate the grid cells, so it’s better to change this setting before you do anything in the editor. This setting also affects some default values when creating a new tile, as different tilemaps require different shaped tiles.

Once you’ve exported your tiles, you won’t be able to change this setting.

Rule tile script

The rule tile script specifies what script to use for exporting the tiles. This is closely tied to the grid type, as you cannot use a square tile script with a hexagonal grid, and vice versa. If you’ve created custom rule tile scripts, they’ll show up in this dropdown.

Custom scripts

This option was introduced to add support for custom rule tile scripts. If you don’t have any custom scripts, leave the option as Default and the correct script will automatically be selected.

Simplify rules

This option affects how the rules will be generated. If this option is enabled, every Tiling rule that has the same output sprite will be combined into a single tiling rule. It’ll compare every of those tiling rules, and create one tiling rule that’s true for all of those scenarios. This will prevent unnecessary duplicate tiling rules. For this option to work as you’d like, you need to give it as much samples as possible, so it can filter through every scenario and choose the one that applies to all. You can look at he Examples provided with the package to see this option in action.

Universal sprite settings

If this option is disabled, you can use the grid cell inspector tool to inspect a grid cell, and change it’s properties like output sprite, collider, animation and settings like this. But this means that if you have multiple tiling rules with the same sprite, those settings will not match. If universal sprite settings is enabled, these options from the grid cell inspector will move to the Sprite override settings. In this window you can change the sprite output settings per sprite and not per tiling rule. If you change a sprites’ settings in this override settings window, every tiling rule that has the same sprite output will use the same sprite settings. You can open the Sprite override settings from the toolbar.

Treat similar tiles as same

With this option enabled, when setting up a tiling rule to a tile that is set up to automatically connect to other tiles, the automatically connected tiles will be treated as if it was that same tile in the tiling rules.

Here’s an example: We have 3 different tiles: dirt, grass and stone. The dirt tile is set up to connect to the grass tile, and the grass tile is set up to connect to the dirt tile. If we draw a tiling rule for the stone tile on the grid that makes the stone tile connect to the dirt tile, with this option enabled that tiling rule will connect to both the dirt and grass tile. If this option is disabled it’ll only connect to the dirt tile.

Generate tiles

Pressing this button will start the export process, which can take a second or two depending on how complex your tiles are. After the process is done, the tiles will be saved to the container asset and the asset will be highlighted in the project window. The generated tiles will be saved into the container in order to keep them synced, and if you modify and export them again, it will update the already existing tiles instead of creating new ones.

Warning

The exported tiles are all managed by the editor, so you cannot edit, rename or delete them in the exported form. In order to do so you have to do it in the BRT editor window, then export them again to see your changes take effect.

Info

Exporting the tiles again will update the already existing tiles, so any changes you do in the editor will show in the tiles already placed (you might need to restart the scene or reload the tilemap).

Caution

Deleting a tile from the tile drawer that you’ve already placed in your scene and exporting it will result in the old exported tile getting deleted as well, which cannot be recovered!

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