Is it possible to tile box colliders without causing "false" collisions in Unity3D?

Question

This is in regards to something like a sidescroller where you have a tiled map where each tile uses a 2d box collider.

If you use a 2d circular collider as an example for your character, as it rolls across a series of tiled 2d box colliders, it will occasionally collide with the seams between tiles rather than rolling smoothly across them.

In my scenario here, the tiles are 1x1 units snapped directly adjacent to each other. When rolling a 2d circular collider across a row of tiles, it goes mostly smooth but the more force applied, the greater chance of the circle flying up into the air rather than it's y staying the same as it rolls across them.

The obvious conclusion I had was to use edge colliders instead which works fine, but I'm hoping to find a way to completely eliminate this problem even with just 2d box colliders.

Thanks, Tim

Answer 1

Edge colliders are likely to have better performance characteristics for this type of situation, since this is exactly the type of use case they were meant for.

That said, if you want to do it with box colliders, you can have a script that simplifies the world collision representation by grouping adjacent boxes. Say after scanning the tiles in your level it detects 5 identical floor tiles in a row; it could delete those 5 colliders and create a new, larger box collider that occupies the same space. Then there are no seams within that 5-tile span (and fewer collision objects to check - bonus!)

This could be done as an offline process via an Editor script (though this may interfere with subsequent editing of the level), or as a runtime preprocessing step when the level is loaded (which may delay the loading somewhat, but profile to see if it's noticeable).

Answer 2

for anyone still reading this adding a composite collider 2d to the tilemap and checking used by composite on the tilemap collider will fix this problem. :)