Tiled2Unity is dead. Long live SuperTiled2Unity.

Since May of 2014, Tiled2Unity has been a popular piece of software, mostly due to Tiled Map Editor being an essential 2D authoring tool and because Unity has been slow to support tile-based assets.

However, in the past year I’ve accumulated significant fatigue with further Tiled2Unity development due to these factors:

• The external Tiled2Unity exporter (a C# Windows Forms application) was a huge pain to support for both Windows and Mac.
• A small subset of Mac users kept running into crashes I wasn’t able to resolve involing managed wrappers of native graphic libraries.
• Tiled2UnityLite never took hold as a viable solution for Linux users.
• Tiled files were external to Unity which made debugging difficult. (Users often had maps, tilesets, and textures all over the place which made sharing a pain.)
• Graphical seams was an ongoing drain on support and the fix for these artifacts was unsatisfying.
• Unity support for tiles and tilemaps was maturing, thereby deprecating Tiled2Unity (which uses Wavefront object meshes).

For a time I had decided to toss Tiled2Unity to the side but have you tried using Unity as tilemap editor? I think it’s a bit of a mess. Further, I’ve built up a lot of Tiled data that I didn’t want to recreate in Unity’s editing environment.

So instead I’ve recreated Tiled2Unity from the ground up taking advantage of new Unity features such as Scripted Importers and Tilemaps. The result is SuperTiled2Unity which is now ready for public consumption.

But beware: This is an early release. Even Unity considers their new classes as experimental and subject to change.

SuperTiled2Unity Improvements

Starting over with a Tiled importer allowed me to resolve these issues:

• No more external exporter. Tiled files are now treated as true Unity assets that are automatically imported into prefabs as you make changes in Tiled.
• Support for all platforms. Running everything in the Unity Editor puts Windows, Mac OS, and Linux users on an even playing field.
• Seams fixed once and for all. Tiles are grouped into a texture atlas during import and padded appropriately so that mathematical imprecision with UV coordinates does not lead to these annoying artifacts.
• New Unity classes supported. The Tilemap class is a welcome addition to Unity. No more meshes!

SuperTiled2Unity strives to compliment all Tiled features including isometric or hexagonal maps, colliders, flipped tiles, animated tiles, templates, objects, groups, etc.. If a feature is missing let me know and I’ll try to support it.

SuperTiled2Unity is distributed as a single Unity package. And, yes, it is free but dontations are always apprecated.

I also encourage everyone to make a contribution towards further Tiled Map Editor development. Thorbjørn Lindeijer has put years of effort into Tiled. It’s a great program that he easily could have charged real money for. Please give him your support.

Thanks and enjoy!