How to display a tile map efficiently?

Question

Hello everyone,

I have a pretty general question. I'm wondering what the most efficient way in Unity would be to display a tile map. I'm writing an online game and in my case, the client gets the tile data from the server after login, and then instantiates tiles based on that data.

I am aiming for a view distance of 500 tiles in any direction, so 1001x1001 concurrent tiles, over 1 million in total. Each tile has 4 vertices.

So I figured it would be better to make the tiles part of the scene and move them to wherever I want after the login and assign a material, instead of instantiating them by code. But even instantiating 20,000 tiles takes forever, and the Unity Editor is practically not responsive after I do that.

Does anyone have any hints how I should go about this?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Best Answer

Answer by Loius · Nov 13, 2013 at 07:03 AM

You can't have that many objects - you need to build them in chunks. Make a 50x50 mesh, copy-paste it as necessary. You can build meshes at runtime or just assign their uvs at runtime, but Unity just can't handle 20,000 objects being created at once.

Add comment · Show 6 · Share

ffxz7ff · Nov 13, 2013 at 09:13 AM 0

Share

Hmm that's kind of unfortunate, but good to know at least. If I was making 50x50 chunks, how would I apply different textures to each tile though? Wouldn't I need to create a texture for the whole chunk at runtime, since I don't know before I log in which of those tiles are dirt and grass etc?

ffxz7ff · Nov 13, 2013 at 10:26 AM 0

Share

I suppose this is where submeshes come into play? Can anyone point me to a submeshes tutorial maybe? I really can't find one.

EDIT: Never$$anonymous$$d, the accepted answer to this link cleared things up for me: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/312492/submesh-creation-from-script.html

I'll try to make chunks with submeshes.

ffxz7ff · Nov 13, 2013 at 09:31 PM 0

Share

Well, I did end up doing that. I can make chunks now. But the texture problem isn't solved. Is it even possible to assign different materials to submeshes?

Eric5h5 · Nov 13, 2013 at 10:10 PM 0

Share

Yes, that's the entire reason submeshes exist.

ffxz7ff · Nov 13, 2013 at 10:15 PM 0

Share

You don't happen to have any tutorial on how to do that?

I set the number of submeshes and assigned the triangles to each submesh. But the mesh class doesn't have any method like getSub$$anonymous$$esh or anything. I'm confused.

Show more comments

How to display a tile map efficiently?

1 Reply

Your answer

Follow this Question

Related Questions