Posted September 16, 2023 by Vinark117
#Update
Hello everyone! I'm happy to announce that I've finally finished the biggest update for Better Rule Tiles since launch!
The update includes a lot of minor improvements and quality of life changes, but also adds some new features too.
Before I get into more details about the new features, let's list out all the major changes:
For more details you can look at the full changelog.
With this update a new way of editing the sprites' outputs got added. Instead of changing all the tiles one by one on the grid with the grid cell inspector tool, you can now enable the universal sprite settings, where you can apply those same settings universally to every rule that uses the same sprite. Assets created before the update will have this feature disabled by default, but you can enable it in the export settings. Newly created assets will have this feature enabled by default.
After you've enabled this feature a new button will appear on the toolbar, next to the sprite drawer button. You can use this button to show the "sprite override settings" window. You can drag sprites in to this window the same way you can to the sprite drawer. Alternatively, if you're not sure which sprite was the one you wanted to modify, you can also add a sprite by inspecting it on the grid with the cell inspector tool and clicking the "add to overrides button".
After you've added the sprites you can just click to edit it. When clicking on the sprite it also selects it for drawing so you don't have to constantly swich back and forth between this window and the sprite drawer.
Preset blocks are a new way of creating interactions between the tiles. Esentially, it's just extending the range where the tiles check for their neighbors, but the fact that it's so simple to set up makes it a really useful feature.
Preset blocks are best used for structures that need to have specific shapes. If the shape drawn on the tilemap matches the shape of the structure in the preset block, than the structure in the preset block will be displayed.
The toolbar now adapts to the size of your editor window by moving the sections down to another row if the window gets too narrow to display the toolbar buttons in a single row.
Previously, you had to mark all the textures you wanted to use with the tool as read and write enabled. From this update, this process is now automatic and you no longer need to mark them as readable.
One of the most requested features was to add additional samples to the tool... So I added just that! There are now 7 samples with each of their own tile palette, scene and an explanation for them. The 7 samples are the following:
Additionally to the samples, I alse made a tileset for them, which you're free to use in your projects. Though I ask you that if you do use the tileset, please give credit for it.
I hope this update was worth the wait, and that you can utilize these new features to their fullest. Have fun creating games!