i'm kind of curious about peoples thoughts on this subject.
so far all people have said is "it is a bad idea" without any information as to why ?
i'm doing a scrolling shooter, where background is a "map" and the player can go any which way, within the bounds of the map.
i actually started off writing some code/routines to do tiles and a "scrolling viewport".
i ran into a couple of issues with this design :
a) i was using the technique others had described elsewhere about "tiling" the background, then doing a CreateImage() of the backbuffer to get a static image of the "viewport".
this was fast when the player was within the "static image" limits, but when the player pushed the edge of the map, and it had to rebuild, it was _dog_ slow.
b) i'm not an artist, and it seemed like the artwork would be a pain (trying to get individual tiles to line up together and look right etc ...)
so ... i'll ask the question :
_why_ is having a single large image as a map for your shooter a bad thing ?
strictly memory ?
it can't be for performance ? - my scrolling routine now has _great_ performance when i'm scrolling over a large, static image, and slows to a crawl when i'm assembling tiles between frames.
i created a PNG just for a test, with a size 4096x4096.
i don't have alot of colors and stuff in it right now ... but initially, the size on disk doesn't seem too unreasonable.
i would appreciate and definitive information on this subject.
Tony
so far all people have said is "it is a bad idea" without any information as to why ?
i'm doing a scrolling shooter, where background is a "map" and the player can go any which way, within the bounds of the map.
i actually started off writing some code/routines to do tiles and a "scrolling viewport".
i ran into a couple of issues with this design :
a) i was using the technique others had described elsewhere about "tiling" the background, then doing a CreateImage() of the backbuffer to get a static image of the "viewport".
this was fast when the player was within the "static image" limits, but when the player pushed the edge of the map, and it had to rebuild, it was _dog_ slow.
b) i'm not an artist, and it seemed like the artwork would be a pain (trying to get individual tiles to line up together and look right etc ...)
so ... i'll ask the question :
_why_ is having a single large image as a map for your shooter a bad thing ?
strictly memory ?
it can't be for performance ? - my scrolling routine now has _great_ performance when i'm scrolling over a large, static image, and slows to a crawl when i'm assembling tiles between frames.
i created a PNG just for a test, with a size 4096x4096.
i don't have alot of colors and stuff in it right now ... but initially, the size on disk doesn't seem too unreasonable.
i would appreciate and definitive information on this subject.
Tony