yep, tiles are the way to go. the trick is to draw an image that represents a small section of the map, then use a tile ripper app (ie create one its not diffiuclt). which will go through the 32x32 chunks of image data and try to find the matching areas. most art wont work well, but if the artist is skilled enough you should split the image into a decent set of tiles. now you can use the tiles to create the rest of the levels.

remeber, you dont have a huge backbuffer with all the tile data predrawn. you actual draw the entire screen each frame with the tiles. though i am sure some games used a off screen buffer which represented the current screen plus an extra column. then this was copied to the backbuffer with an offset. once the player moved enough (ie a single tile), the offscreen buffer was redrawn. remeber having the entire background in memory at once is not an option. since you have the tiles in memory at all times and have the tile map in mmeory. you can easily draw the screen.

using tile layers that move at different speeds you achieve parallax scrolling. tiles can have transparnet sections just like sprites.

The book for tiles is Action Arcade Adventure Set!

quote:Original post by Tai-Pan
No, I dont think that with todays Power tiles would be necessary, it would be ridiculous; I could use bitmaps, but I dont get how I could have such a large level, maybe I could load a bitmap and then other and other and other..

If you did that, displaying a bitmap after another, and another one after that etc. Guess what you would have... A tile engine. Your tiles would be fairly large (like a screenfull or two), but it would still be a tile-engine. And this tile engine could most likely be made more efficient by cutting down the tile-size, so you could take better advantage of repeating patterns in the background.