This is a small rant, but I really would appreciate some help if anyone out there is able.

The new Tilemap system is utterly confusing. What is the purpose of having the ability to create multiple Terrain Sets with each having multiple Terrains? It seems convoluted and unnecessary. Plus, the Terrains that are configured for auto-tiling within the same Terrain Set don't even respect each other. It is totally broken. I tried creating multiple sets of terrains for my grass (spring, summer, fall, winter) - a simple use-case. Forget about coding procedural generated tiles, just painting them on the map using the tools shows me they do not auto-tile correctly over each other. Throw in Layers and I am totally confused. What is the use-case for Layers? They seem to work like switches, fading terrain in and out - but for what purpose? Multiple tilemaps serve as their own layers with their own Z indexes.

I switched from UNITY to Godot back in September of last year and my experience up to this point has been phenomena! What frustrates me is wholesale re-writes of critical systems and features that force developers to re-think pretty much everything about said features, when it wasn't even necessary. Why not take an incremental, backwards-compatible, community-led approach to improving the tilemap system, especially when it already worked? It did not need a total re-write, imho. Not even the upgrade tool knows what to do with this thing.

I don't know, maybe I leaped in too soon. Maybe that is the problem. If anyone out there in Godot Land has figured this out, PLEASE do a video on it, or better yet, help with documentation. It is sorely needed! I will reflect on turning back to Godot 3.x until these issues are resolved.

    Sorry to say I don't have any answers, but yes I tried the new tilemap out just the other day and I'd say I had pretty much the same experience. Utterly confusing.

    Don't think of Terrain as anything other than a brush, like the pencil tool.

    It just paints tiles, it doesn't add any logic to your tiles. You can clean up the tiles with the pencil tool.

    I do agree that 3 -> 4 is an unnecessarily painful upgrade, even 3.4->3.5 broke my tiles. The v4 tileset is much superior tho. Check Youtube for some tutorials:

    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=godot+4+tilemap

    Also I had to manually delete old Tilemaps from TSCN files from v3 or the editor crashed trying to open them, even simple ones.

    To be clear unless they add an upgrade tool for tilemaps, you have to COMPLETELY REDO any v3 tilemap from scratch.

    I saw a Python tool to help out tho, I can't find the link to it.

    IMO in the future Godot should require an upgrade path from devs breaking compat. Every v3 project is dead now unless someone rewrites it. This just causes community fragmentation

    No help here sorry but some idea to discuss.

    Bound2bCoding What frustrates me is wholesale re-writes of critical systems and features that force developers to re-think pretty much everything about said features, when it wasn't even necessary. Why not take an incremental, backwards-compatible, community-led approach to improving the tilemap system, especially when it already worked?

    I think pretty much the same regarding containers, devs have changed many things (margins getting allegedly offsets but I didn't found any).

    I guess documentation need a lot, I mean really a lot, improvements, more official tutorials, more about migration, new features, changed features and mostly, the why. Devs knows, discuss between them on github so this generate thousands of interesting discussions which will never be sorted and organized anywhere else whereas all those knowledge could benefit the community.

    I'm aware it would need quite a lot's of work too to do so but the best tool in the world worth only how users are able to use it the right way and if no one use it, it worth nothing. Unfortunately, this work cannot be done by anyone who want as it needs prior knowledge of the engine and dev process.

    Youtube videos are great on their own but unfortunately, abundance make things worth than better, as among good ones there are tons of bad ones too I guess, people going in all directions, give their own "best ways to do this or that" and guidelines which may contradict one another. A central library officially "approved" in a way or another, would be welcome.

      I have been doing a 2d tile based game in godot 3.5, I guess there's nothing in 4.0 worth upgrading for (for a pretty simple 2d game)? What made you want to jump into 4.0 (for 2d game?).

        Erich_L

        One of the cool things about v4 is hot-reloading. So you can edit a scene and have it updated in real-time in the game. There are some other neat features like being able to select list of nodes under cursor in the Editor 2D scene display. TBH I would recommend anyone wait on upgrading a project from v3-v4 until v4 becomes more mature

          Erich_L I want to be able to take advantage of the new GDScript improvements, noise library, and multi-thread optimizations coming with 4.0. Since I am quite a ways away from anything that resembles a release, I thought it was a good idea to get into 4.0 sooner rather than later, just to minimize the amount of code that needs to be refactored. But the current state of the Tilemap makes upgrading for me a non-starter. I will wait until later in the year, unless some better documentation or videos surface before then.

            I think 4.0 is a good starting point for new projects, others might want to wait for 4.1 or later.