Entitiles

Entitiles are a conceptual data-structuring primitive used in grid-based interfaces to represent individual entities. Each entitile pairs a spatial position with a compact set of metadata about the entity occupying that cell, enabling rendering and querying from a single object.

An entitile typically includes an identifier, a type or category, a small attribute set, and an optional state such as selected or visible. Implementations vary in how much metadata is stored directly on the tile versus retrieved on demand.

Common uses include video games with tile maps, where a tile may represent a unit, obstacle, or resource; and geographic information systems or dashboards, where a grid encodes assets, events, or statuses. Operations on entitiles include filtering by type or attribute, interaction such as selecting an entitile to reveal its attributes, and aggregation across neighboring tiles for clustering or heatmaps. Animations can be driven by changes in the entitile’s state.

Advantages include compact representation, efficient rendering at grid scale, and straightforward interactivity. Limitations include potential bloat when tiles carry large attribute sets, ambiguity when multiple entities share a tile, and performance trade-offs if updates are frequent.

Relation to other concepts: entitiles are related to tiles and sprites in games and to voxel or layer-based approaches in visualization; they often appear in discussions of entity-component-system design and grid-based data models.

Etymology and history: the term blends “entity” and “tile.” It originated in discussions of grid-based visualization and game architecture to describe a tile that carries entity-related metadata.

See also: tile, tile map, ECS, data visualization, GIS.