Clarification on advantage of tile set's alternative tiles

[rugged knoll]

Bringing this over from #❓┃quick-help as suggested:

👋 Hi, new to Godot but not game dev, and just looking to understand something about alternative tiles in tile sets as the docs don't cover it as far as I can tell - are alternative tiles a reference to the original asset with modification (aka cheaper in memory / to draw) or does the engine make essentially a separate asset with the alternations when the alternate is made (and therefore no real benefit over making a separate asset other than organization)?

[vapid crow]

On it

Just looking it up, and reading about it first

Alternative tiles are just extra metadata rows that still point at the very same sprite rectangle (atlas coords) in your tilesheet, so they don’t duplicate the texture in RAM or VRAM and they batch together with the base tile.

The only extra cost is a few dozen bytes of TileData in the .tres plus whatever per-tile properties you change. Unless you give an alternative its own custom material, it will render in the same single draw call.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/using_tilesets.html

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_tileset.html

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_tilemap.html

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.5/tutorials/performance/batching.html

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_tilesetatlassource.html

[rugged knoll]

Got it. Was hoping that was the case. Thanks for looking into it! Not sure what the convention is for contributing/updating the docs is, but it might be worth mentioning in this section https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/using_tilesets.html#creating-alternative-tiles that utilizing alternate tiles is a performance increase in addition to the convenience

[vapid crow]

Mm, I’ll try to remember this, thank you

You can tag solved now if you’re happy

https://tenor.com/view/yeah-muito-bem-hell-yeah-vai-garoto-gif-14366181

[rugged knoll]

Can do! Thanks again and have a great day!

[magic totem]

psst just in case tilemaps are deprecated content, I would look into TilemapLayer documentation instead.