2D tools

Three panels edit the engine's 2D files, the Settings panel edits sorting layers, and the scene view gets handles for 2D colliders. Each panel edits its own file, with its own undo and Save, separate from the scene's. The editor is a preview.

Preview: these tools shipped on 3 November 2026 and have not yet been run through the editor's end-to-end suite.

Tilemap panel#

Paints .tilemap.json files. Open it with a double click on a .tilemap.json in Assets, or Edit tilemap on an entity's Tilemap component in the Inspector. It docks as a tab beside Scene.

• Tools: brush, rectangle, fill, erase and pick, with a palette drawn from the tileset's atlas.
• Layers: select, show or hide, add, remove and reorder. Showing and hiding is a panel setting, not saved in the file.
• Undo, Redo and Save buttons. A stroke is one undo step, however many cells it paints.
• The file is saved in the engine's own layout, each layer in the encoding it had, so a git diff shows only the cells you changed (a file in another layout is rewritten once, on its first save). If the file changes on disk with no unsaved edits, the panel reloads it; with unsaved edits it offers Reload, or Save over it.

The scene view shows the new cells when you save. To bring in Tiled or LDtk maps, use the engine's ignifx import tilemap command.

Atlas panel#

Packs PNGs into a sprite atlas: <name>.png and <name>.atlas.json, beside the sources. Choose New Atlas… in the Assets panel's context menu for the folder it shows, or double-click an .atlas.json to re-pack it. It opens as a tab beside Assets.

Tick the sources, then set the name, padding, extrude, max size, trim, power-of-two sides and nearest filtering. Preview shows the sheet with each frame outlined; Pack writes it. Packing the same inputs gives the same bytes. The list of sources is kept in an editor section of the .atlas.json, which the engine ignores, and the panel refuses to overwrite files it did not pack.

Sprite Animation panel#

Edits .spriteanim.json clips. Select one in Assets and choose Edit Animation…, or select an .atlas.json and choose New Sprite Animation…, which writes <atlas>.spriteanim.json with one default clip.

• Clips: add, remove and rename; set fps and loop.
• Frames: drag to reorder, click or drop an atlas frame from the palette to add one, × to remove. Events are set per frame and follow their frame when it moves.
• Play, pause and scrub a preview drawn in the panel.
• Undo, Redo, Save and Revert. A file changed on disk while open is caught when you save; Revert reads it again.

The format has no per-frame duration and no event payload, so the panel offers neither.

Sorting layers#

File → Project Settings… shows the sortingLayers section as a list, back to front: add a layer, rename it by editing its name, move it up or down, or remove it. A rename or removal rewrites every scene, prefab and tilemap that names the layer, after a dialog that lists each file. The open scene changes in one undo step, Rename sorting layer. Removing a layer renames its uses to Default; Default itself cannot be renamed or removed.

2D collider handles#

Select an entity with a 2D collider in a 2D scene, and the scene view shows handles on its outline: a box's edges and corners, a circle's radius, a polygon's or an edge's points. A drag is one undo step, and the outline follows it live.

Known limitations#

• The scene view shows tilemap edits on save, not while you paint, and previews sprite animations only in the panel, not in the scene.
• Ctrl+Z and the Edit menu stay with the scene document; use the panels' own Undo and Redo buttons.
• The unsaved-changes prompt on quit or project switch does not cover a tilemap.
• The canvases (painting, picking frames) need a pointer; they are not keyboard-accessible.
• In a project whose ignifx.config.ts defines sortingLayers, as both 2D templates do, that file wins: the Settings panel marks the list not in effect.
• Capsule colliders have no handles.
• There are no MCP tools for the 2D panels yet; agents edit those files directly.