[FIXED] Getting a Tilemap Layer to render to a texture ?

[Refeuh]

Hi all !

I'm having some issues with getting tilemap layers to render to textures if added to custom groups instead of the default game.world.

Context : I'm working on a top-down pixel-art a-rpg (think Zelda 3-like). I have a mix of tilemap layers and sprites. Nothing too fancy.
Goal : I want to implement a custom upscaling shader (e.g. hq4x). I'm changing my scene to draw layers and sprites to a texture, so that I can use that texture with my custom shader.
Progress : I can easily get sprites to render to my texture, and using my shader to display that texture also works well
Problem :  To avoid overhead of individual draw calls per sprite/layer, I use a top-level Group container ; but I can only get tilemap layers to appear if they are added to the game.world and not to my top-level container :-?

In my preload() : nothing exciting, just the tilemap (Tiled json), some images/spritesheets, and a shader/fragment

In my create() :

// The top-level container to hold display objects
this.m_group = new Phaser.Group(this.game, null);

// The render texture where I want all display objects to appear. Later the size will need to differ from the game size, for the "upscaling" part
this.m_renderTarget = this.game.add.renderTexture(g_screenWidth, g_screenHeight, "RenderTarget");

// The actual sprite using the render texture
let rtSprite : Phaser.Sprite = this.game.add.sprite(0, 0, this.m_renderTarget);

// Sprite test ; this works nicely
let sprite : Phaser.Sprite = this.game.make.sprite(0, 0, "Player");
this.m_group.add(sprite);

// Layer test ; this does NOT work
this.m_map = this.game.make.tilemap("Overworld");
this.m_map.addTilesetImage("Tileset", "Tileset");
this.m_layer = this.m_map.createLayer("Layer", g_gameWidth, g_gameHeight, this.m_group);

(I've excluded the shader/filter setup, not relevant for the problem)

In my Update() :

this.m_renderTarget.renderXY(this.m_group, 0, 0);

I was thinking using the 4th parameter "parent" of the createlayer method to add it to top-container would be sufficient. This is not the case.

The only way I found to get my layer to appear on my render texture is 1. add the layer to the default game.world, 2. turn off the layer.renderable (because I don't actually want it in the default scene), 3. create a sprite using the layer texture. 4. add the sprite to my container group. Which looks like :

this.m_layer = this.m_map.createLayer("Layer");
this.m_layer.renderable = false;
let sprite : Phaser.Sprite = this.game.make.sprite(0, 0, this.m_layer.texture);
this.m_group.add(sprite);

While this is functional, this sounds overly convoluted and non-intuitive, so surely I'm not using the whole thing correctly ! The layer should behave as a display object and I don't understand why it needs to be treated differently :-?

Additionally, I tried having a separate rendertexture.renderXY() call for the layer (this.m_renderTarget.renderXY(this.m_layer, 0, 0, true);) ; same problem, the layer only appears if added to the game.world and not to any other container.

Any idea what I'm missing or doing wrong ? Any help would be greatly appreciated !

Regards

[Refeuh]

Additionally, while I'd rather do the upscaling myself (w,h) => (4*w, 4*h), I could probably achieve what I want if I could work on the "phaser-upscaled" image ; in case there's an alternative solution to my problem...

Still, I'm curious about the use of tilemap layers in group containers :-?

[Refeuh]

And just to illustrate things a bit clearer, a couple of screenshots demonstrating the pixel processing I'm doing. Note that since I'm stuck with Tilemap Layers not rendering to render textures, this is just my shader working on a static picture of the game I exported to a small test environment -

Base picture ; simple "nearest" scaling x3

Processed picture : some minor colour adjustment (vibrance, brightness, etc.), scanlines, and the manual upscaling (a simpler ~EPX3x in this case)

As soon as I figure out how to deal with Tilemap Layers I'm hoping to get this live on my game !

[Refeuh]

Quick update, in case anyone cares or find this topic while facing a similar issue ; this seems to be a bug in the version of Phaser I'm using and appears to be fixed in the latest 2.6.1 : I've re-created a test sample in the online editor and this seems to behave as expected :

http://phaser.io/sandbox/edit/dFJUoMIL

[Fatalist]

22 hours ago, LGV said:

This looks great, much easier on the eyes than the pixelated version. I wonder why don't more games use this method...