= Features wanted = When not moving it can take only update parts of the screen. update(dirty_rects) can be used to speed up drawing. by only updating areas which are dirty. if the map is not moving we can make it lots speedier.

• Offscreen buffer. Blit all smaller tiles to an offscreen buffer then blit one big image to the screen. This can be faster on some screens/computers. Different tile sizes. different sizes on the same map. Join maps together easily. Different drawable sizes. Ie different camera views. Be able to be used with pygame or pyopengl. Different camera modes: jump scrolling, jump the map in blocks. Like ten pixels at a time. smooth scrolling, every pixel the camera moves the tiles move. smooth-jump scrolling. Mostly the screen stays still. When the character nears the edge everything stops moving while the maps scrolls over a little way. centered camera. Can center the camera on Looping Map Edges Paralax scrolling. Moving layers at different speeds. Multiple views of the map. * miniview of the map. Perhaps using a scaled version or one pixel per tile.

• minimize overdraw. using dirty rectangles. for alpha images precalculate full rects. That is like a bounding box in the middle where the area is full. think about using a coverage buffer. * animated tiles will probably always need to be redrawn(unless it's the same frame).

• Overlapping tiles. As well as overlapping whole maps. For joining maps together. Layers/Z ordering. draw characters by descending y value on same layer. for certain types of games: see for explanation: * http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/gpgenesis9/page7.asp

• line of sight tests between tiles and pixels/rects. collision detection between tiles and pixels/rects. some tiles may be pass through. * tiles on different layers may be collidable, others not.

• fog of war. * darkening/lightening of areas.

• Rotatable tiles. * scalable tiles? Other transforms needed?

• Easy layer toggling. * So eg when you go inside a building the roof comes off and you can see inside.

= Implementation ideas =

• Use pygame sprites and sprite groups. could then reuse lots of code... optimize in one place. Speed development. think of camera movement as simply moving a sprite group in a certain way.

• Use a quad tree for the collision detection. * Could use it for moving, and non moving.

• Left to right, or top to bottom scrollers can be optimized in different ways.

= Some map editors =

The tile combie(or engine if you want) should have most of the features that these map editors contain.

http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/

http://www.tilemap.co.uk/

= A discussion about features =

<geoffh> background tiling, layers, collision detection between layers and stuff (rect and pixel) <geoffh> paralax scrolling <geoffh> animation of background/sprites <geoffh> line of sight tests between tiles and pixels <geoffh> based on layer compositions and such <illumeh> eek, that's a lot of stuff <illumeh> good stuff :) <geoffh> separate environmental and UI layer systems <illumeh> what do you mean? <geoffh> so you can draw your UI without worrying how height your environments layers are <geoffh> the UI layers are alwayrs on top <illumeh> ah, cool <geoffh> basically, just 2 lists for heights <geoffh> auto-shadowing for sprites is good <illumeh> indeed, that'd be cool <geoffh> doing like angled skews on the images, and drawing them on the ground layer <geoffh> so you dont have to have separate shadow images for them <illumeh> nice <geoffh> or just auto positioning the same image, but based on heigth of the sprite

<geoffh> so like a flying ship has its shadow in the real place, and its in its height-adjusted place, like zaxxon <geoffh> which basically just means you have a transformation for height built in, and use a sort of worrld coords and translated drawing coords <illumeh> aah <geoffh> which makes sense <geoffh> so you should have parameters to what your viewing perspective is, so they can adjust it based on how their art is rendered <geoffh> like: 1.5:1.0 or something

<geoffh> you could also have layer toggling like i did in VT, where if you go into a building, it switches what the background tiles are. and if you change floors, it also does that <illumeh> ah, that sounds nice too <geoffh> but that may be a bit specific. though, you could make the design so its possible to rotate through BG tile maps specifically, like theyre layered and do a fall through if the current selected one doesnt exist <geoffh> to the default background map, which has all its spaces mapped <geoffh> sorta an "optional current level background" <geoffh> good for things where people take stairs, and you still want the ground of things outside buildings and such <geoffh> im running out of stuff ive thought about for tiling engines <illumeh> hehe. that's all stuff I didn't think about :) <geoffh> i want to retire <geoffh> im pretty happy doing fuck all all the time now <geoffh> heh <illumeh> having layers greyed out would be good <illumeh> hehe. mostly I'm happy doing fuck all too :) <geoffh> optional layers? or you mean something else?