MiniDevSchool
Crazy Tractor's Infinite Level System

Lesson 4: Efficient Tile Updating

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✨ What You'll Learn:

  • How to minimize updates by focusing on visible edges

  • How to use a component to update individual tiles

🧠 Deeper Dive:

When the grid moves, inner tiles are visible. To save on performance, we only update the outer edge tiles (top/bottom rows and left/right columns). We use a TileVisualUpdater script on each tile to refresh its appearance.

Instead of updating every tile, we update only:

  • First and last row

  • First and last tile in each middle row

This drastically improves performance for larger grids and keeps the illusion of an “infinite” grid.

✅ Code Example:

private void UpdateTileEdges()
{
    foreach (GameObject tile in TileGrid[0].Tiles)
        tile.GetComponent()?.UpdateVisual();

    foreach (GameObject tile in TileGrid[TileGrid.Count - 1].Tiles)
        tile.GetComponent()?.UpdateVisual();

    for (int i = 1; i < TileGrid.Count - 1; i++)
    {
        tile.GetComponent()?.UpdateVisual();

        TileRow row = TileGrid[i];
        row.Tiles[0].GetComponent()?.UpdateVisual();
        row.Tiles[row.Tiles.Count - 1].GetComponent()?.UpdateVisual();
    }
}