How do I animate tiles?

Hi all,

I am using a tilemap in my top down RPG game and I would like to animate the water tiles. I can imagine a couple ways I could do this.

One would be to use sprites and animate them but I am worried about how heavy this will be on the system when there could be thousands of these tiles. Another way I thought about doing it would be to use tileIDs and just continuously switch from one tile ID to the next to the next but I'm also worried about how computationally expensive this will be.

Does anyone have a method that is light and works well?

Thanks for your help!

I don't know if this will work for you but here's a trick I've used before.

dropbox.com/s/wyiz1r06s2p3o5w/autotile.c3p

The water is it's own layer under the tilemap, which is transparent where there should be water. It consists of two tiled backgrounds sliding across each other with the sine movements.

Alternatively, I imagine animating by swapping tiles should work perfectly well, if you constrain the updates to happen only if the tile is on screen, or animate only a random portion of the tiles at a time rather than all at once.

Thank you so much oosyrag for your response.

I'm going to look into both of these methods and see what works best. Constraining the updates to happen only if on screen is a great tip!