 When I started planning my 2D puzzle game video I stumbled upon one of Godot's worst implemented features, tilesets. If you make any kind of 2D game you know what tilesets are, but just in case you don't here are some examples of what tilesets are used for. It is basically a big image that you divide into small pieces that you reuse to create a level or anything really. It is the most common element in any old school RPG and it is generally a great way to make a big scene using less processing power and keeping the amount of assets to a minimum. So when I had to cover how tilesets work in Godot I remember how bad they were implemented. The UI is terrible and super hard to explain, so instead of using the right tool I just made a bunch of duplicated notes and got a functional game. This is of course not the proper way of doing it, but I already have to cover many things in one video and adding a problem this big makes people lose attention and the video gets super long and convoluted. If you search for any video on tilesets you will notice how a tutorial for just that is as long as the entire 2D puzzle video I put out which covers almost everything you need to make an entire game, not just a feature of the editor. But I must say that even if it wasn't for a tutorial I would still not use Godot's tileset because they are just not fun to use. Recently Juan made a twitter poll asking Godot users about what parts of the Godot 2D editor we believe needs the most work. And surprise surprise I was not alone. The majority of people chose the tile map editor as the thing that needs the most work right now. This was of course a smart setup by Juan since they recently hired a new person to work on the 2D editor side of things and we now have a better idea of what the role map looks like for our new hero. Jills growled with the air or however you pronounce it I hope I did it right. Other big creators like JDQuest or Harvest join the conversation and share their opinions about this and the tileset seems to be the most frustrating parts for us all. So now you must be asking why do we hate it so much? Well let's have a look. I'm going to be creating a small scene using tilesets in Godot. So when we add a 2D sprite here we have an empty texture. So what do we do? We add our sprite which is this Kenny asset that we have which is a big tileset to use. So if you want to add a sprite to the game you can drag and drop it to the scene or add the texture to the sprite. We see it in game nothing weird. We get this ok. But let's remove this one. But now if a new user comes here and press add child and they do tile because they might be doing ok. Now to do a tileset. So this is what a new user would do. Tile map. A note for 2D tile based maps ok. Create. Ooh I see the grid already. There's a nice orange grid and this seems promising because this is something I understand the tiles, the squares ok. Give a tileset resource to this tile map to use its tiles ok. So I guess that I need to add the tilesets let's see can I drag and drop them there no. So no ok. I need to create a resource so here tileset resource new tileset ok the message disappeared that means I can add it now no ok. So if I cannot add it here like where do I add them? Heel cells is the size ok so this is this I understand this makes sense let's do 32 32 now I want to add the tiles where do I add them collision no occluder no ok I don't know let's let's press here tileset what is this the entire interface changed I don't see the panel I don't see the grid anymore are we in the right place here there's a resource still no texture or anything ok let's read this add or select a texture of on the left panel to edit the tiles bound to it ok let's add a texture ok we have it we have the texture here so let's go back to our tile map let's select it no nothing there ok let's go back to the tileset oh it's empty what happened why is this empty ok let's do it again color ok and is there a save button no there's no save button so I guess I need to do something with this if I click nothing happened let's see there must be a way in all these kind of things there's always like you can input 32 32 and it will auto generate the tiles because everything is in place there I don't need anything in special but I guess I need to do add single tile because yeah it's the first button here ok and what now oh oh why is this I'm selecting why is this not on a grid we were setting the grid before which was a value on the time up and now I have this and it has no grid ok let's enable this but this is not properties the snap ok here let's see 16 by 16 ok oh but it seems like the tileset has like a one pixel of space in between them so ok let's select this tree we have this tree here and let's go back to the time up oh I can see the tree and now I can start doing this let's go back to make this smaller and I cannot the tree do I need to do this for all of them new single time ok where are the tiles I created are the ones in yellow how can I differentiate the one time editing with the one that it's already there I don't know and what is this collision navigation this for adding properties there but yeah this is very confusing so of course I was playing dumb here I was trying to simulate as if I was a new user but you can see why the confusion can happen and a lot of things that can already be improved I understand that the tools allow you to do a lot of flexible and powerful stuff mixing different textures for making tile sets but I don't really know why this is here this is a cool feature to have but I don't think that you would be mixing several tilesets into one tile map and creating this this is like way too complicated it has a bit of feature creep I would say why there's not a mode to just select this add the texture and set the sprite like separation or whatever and have it you know all auto generated so you can start painting on it and then you can add this special tool for making the auto tiles the special stuff hiding adding collisions and when you have this tool like you should still be able to see the tiles that you already have and all the other information so you can see how this feature can be confusing and not really handy because you can get almost the same experience for adding sprites and you will also be able to do way more things even if it's not optimized it's better to use something like a tiled editor which is an external problem that you can download this open source and they are important that you can add to get out that will give you a better experience you can select multiple tiles at the same time here if you have a few tiles and you want to add them you cannot you can do that by creating a new tile which you have to repeat the entire process and select a few okay now I have it there so yeah you have to go back there and you can add this but only that and that's it there's no way to do anything else it doesn't respect also the fact that you can paint over it in other editors like if you paint here like and you keep pressing it would start painting here again so they don't overlap there's a lot of user experience stuff that could be improved and you can maybe understand where my frustration is coming when the video released a lot of people a lot of people told me why are you not using tile sets or tile maps why are you doing it this way why are you duplicating the nodes and the short answer is convenience it's convenience and I think that tile maps should be convenient so using them makes sense and help the game developers create amazing stuff with it right now everything's possible and it's very future rich it has a lot of options but I feel it's not in its optimal form I would also like to add that I really want to appreciate that this was not even like this before it was even worse than what we have so I hope that the jump that we make to the next version is as big as the one that we had on the current one at the end of the day even if I complain about all these things the feature is there and it's usable and what it's most important there will be development happening on how tiles work recently gdqus invited me to talk about godot and game maker over at his channel and he got me thinking about how great the godot openness is the communication between the devs and the users is an amazing thing to have and something I hope I don't have to miss once the project gets as big as the well-established engines out there if you want to help make godot a better tool for everyone you can donate at their patreon or sharing contributing or creating content about it and if you want to help me making videos like this one you can join my patreon as well I'm thinking about using the funds that I got so far from patreon to hire a developer and close some of the most dreaded and not popular bugs like in visual scripting and stuff like that I want to improve the coding free tools because I believe that you shouldn't have to be a great programmer to make a game so stay tuned for more news and thanks for staying with me during the video thanks for watching