Unity large,dynamic tile map

Question

I'm thinking of making city transport simulation game, based on tile map like simcity. Because transportation is the main component, I'm not gonna describe city thoroughly, like drawing all the buildings or others. But I need to divide the city to districts and villages.

I want them to be generated randomly, based on tile map system - Actually this doesn't have to be tile based, but I don't have any better idea to generate randomly divided districts.

The problem is there are literally to many tiles. Of course I won't make all the tiles to GameObjects, but array storing the information of tile just gets like 4000x3000 (for 12,000,000 tiles). Is it okay? I think this will seriously slow down the game.

I searched for many ways to generate tile maps, but those tile maps are for RPGs.. they are just sprites and background.

My tiles should change dynamically(maybe the colors, and I'm making the game with 3d so maybe the tile can have height that may change), with showing the status of that tile(a small region of the city). What will be better way for my needs?

Thank you!

Think about an image file of 4000x3000 pixels, maybe find how they deal with that amount of data? — Catwood
Hi user, you can't ask that here. This is for code questions. Go to gamedev.com and you'll get a great answer within hours. — Fattie
Hi @Catwood. That is totally unrelated. Unity3D has (obviously) entire systems and assets related to tile-based games; it is a game engine. — Fattie

Matthew Lynch Matthew Lynch · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-19T15:10:17

The short answer is that you should generate a mesh to represent your tiles. This will allow you to represent a large number of tiles as a single game object.

It is not as troublesome as it sounds. I actually went through this myself recently, and have written a step-by-step guide on how to do it, and how to solve a host of other issues I ran in to working with tiles:

http://matthewlynch.net/2017/02/19/efficient-artefact-free-2d-tile-mapping-in-unity-5-5/

The only caveat I would mention (this is discussed in the tutorial, but not directly addressed) is that you should still divide your map up in some way.

I would not recommend exceeding 100x100 tiles in a single mesh, and in fact would recommend breaking it up even further. But once you get the basics of tile->mesh rendering up and running, this is not difficult to do.

Unity large,dynamic tile map

1 Answers