Tile Spawner

Tile Spawner lets you spawn node instances from a TileMap. Manually placing hundreds of assets is slow and error-prone. TileMaps are easy to add, remove, and manipulate tiles. Tile Spawner is a node that lets you map tiles from a TileSet to scenes in your project and preprocess a TileMap into Node instances as if you had placed them yourself.

Godot can get sluggish when placing lots of instances. Baking ahead-of-time allows you to pay that cost once instead of each time a user launches your scene.

How to use

To use Tile Spawner, create a JSON mapping between the tiles in your TileMap and scene paths in your project. Then point a Tile Spawner node to a TileMap and bake. See below for further details.

TileSet

You need a tileset to represent the things you want to spawn. Usually these things are objects and enemies in your game, but can be anything you need that is more complicated than a Sprite + StaticBody + NavigationMesh (which is all that is offered by a TileMap).

The tiles should be named well so that they'll be easy to reference in the mapping json.

Mapping file

Create a JSON file e.g.

{
    "Coin": {
         "scene": "res://objects/coin.tscn"
    },
    "Bricks": {
         "scene": "res://objects/bricks.tscn"
    },
    "Turtle": {
         "scene": "res://enemies/turtle.tscn"
    }
}

The keys are the name of the tile in the TileSet and the value under the scene key is the resource path to the scene that Tile Spawner will intance when spawning.

TileMap

In your scene, add a TileMap node using the tileset created and mapped above. Paint some tiles.

TileSpawner

In your scene, add a TileSpawner node. Do not add it as a child of the TileMap. Select the TileSpawner and change the following properties:

• Assign the "Source Tilemap" to the above created TileMap.
• Set the mapping to the above created mapping json file.
• Press the Bake tiles to nodes on the control bar.

From here you can repeatedly modify the TileMap and bake.

TileSpawner properties

Source Tilemap

Set this to the TileMap node that you want to spawn nodes from.

Mapping

Set this to a JSON file that describes which tiles spawn which scenes. See the above tutorial for the required format.

Clear Children Before Baking

If set, the TileSpawner will clear its children before spawning nodes from a tilemap. Generally this is something you'll want to leave enabled as it makes it easier to quickly adjust the tilemap then bake multiple times.

Spawn at Runtime

If set, the TileSpawner will bake the nodes when the scene loads. Since baking takes a significant amount of time if the number of nodes is large enough, you should only use this while rapidly editing a TileMap.

Don't ship with this checked; instead bake the nodes with the Bake tiles to nodes button in the control bar.

Target Node

By default, nodes are spawned as children of the TileSpawner. This allows you to change where the nodes will spawn instead.

Grid Alignment

In some cases where pixel-perfection matters and you have odd tile sizes, you might need to snap the spawned object coordinates to whole numbers.

• None will not modify the coordinates
• Round will round the coordinates to the nearest whole number
• Floor will round the coordinates down to the nearest whole number
• Up will round the coordinates up to the nearest whole number
• Trunacte will remove anything past the decimal point in the coordinates