Hi there, I am am fairly new to tile based development and I was looking for any help possible in joining my tiles together to make a map that uses a little memory as possible and is fast in panning and zooming. The map sizes I use are fairly big and the tiles can be up around 10,000 x 10,000. In panning I have decompressed the viewing area of the screen and as I move to a new area of the map it will preload additional tiles and unload un-needed tiles. This works ok, but this is slow and there is a delay in the loading. There must be a better way. With zooming how can I zoom out completely and still keep the memory low and the speed fast? I am using Visual C++ and GDI and Direct X. Any help will be greatly appriciated. Thanks in advance.

I suggest using a 3d API such as openGL or DirectX to do the map.
It helps alot and is quick for zooming etc. After all thats what it is for.

By 10''000x10''000 I assume you mean the map dimensions, not individual tile size. How big are the tile images that you''re loading? I would consider not loading/unloading tile images quite so rapidly, usually tile sets are changed when entering a new ''zone'', be it indoors<->outdoors desert<->dense foliage.

Tilesize  Number Per MB16..........409632..........102464..........256128.........64(For 8bit images) 

Unfortunately, zooming right out to view a 10''000x10''000 tile map would make that... rendering 2e8 triangles per frame, which would bring any computer to its knees.

Fast rotation and zooming can be done easily with D3D or OGL.