In my use case, I want to make hills, but also have other tiles like grass, dirt and sand behind the hill. With the tilemap editor, you cant do this without creating multiple sprites for each background.
I know someone will probably say, “just have multiple tilemap objects and put them on different Z-orders” But, not having multiple objects was one of the reasons the dev team implemented this feature. Also, it would be very tiring to have to switch between multiple objects to edit the tilemap, because they would all be overlapping.
For context, this is mostly incorrect. The major reason provided by the team during the initial feedback was to have an in-engine way to “paint” maps in the scene editor to make it easier to build large areas. Reduction of objects is a side benefit and not an expectation, especially since there is explicit support for “only use one layer of a tile map” in Tiled and LDtk tilemap objects so you can place multiple instances of the map with different layers visible.
It is also a hard requirement to do it with multiple objects (in basically all engines/map systems) if you want to do parallaxing for any background/foreground layers, too.
I dont believe there is any difference here between switching a tile layer and clicking a different scene layer. You will still need to click the desired layer then click into the map in the scene editor. The only difference is you are clicking on a tile layer to enable/select the layer to focus on. Whereas with maps per layer you are disabling the layer you don’t want to focus on.
This is also how it works in many map editors, too. Except in many of those you have to do both (select the layer to paint in AND hide any layers onfront of it).
To be explicitly clear, not saying that this shouldn’t be done, just adding context on the stated reasons for the object, the flexibility of the current method, trying to clear misunderstandings, etc
I think it’s a good idea. For the tilemap object, the layer should be handled like other objects by placing them in a layer such as the ‘Base layer’ etc. Additionally, within the tilemap object itself, we could add layers, allowing tiles to be placed in different layers.
