Hold On!!!

I have tried using that method you suggested, J2xC, (the one with a slightly larger "canvas", and you blit sections of that canvas to the main window). There are problems, however:

If you have animating tiles, you will have to redraw the canvas, or try to draw them "on top" of the canvas each frame (which gets complicated). The same goes for things like doors, switches, etc.

Also, if you are using DirectX, then you will need to store your "canvas" in system memory (because you can''t have surfaces larger than the primary buffer stored in video memory i think...?). This means that every frame you will be blitting from System->Video which is MUCH slower than Video->Video.

So, how do we get this ideal video->video combination?

Here is my method, which, after trying both ways, i must say I prefer:

-Have all your tiles stored in vid mem.
-When you draw, just have two nested loops (for x... for y) and draw all your tiles to the backbuffer.
-The tiles on the edge must be clipped manually (or else if you are using DX they won''t get drawn)

Repeat this each frame.

The advantage is that you don''t waste memory on a large canvas, and that if a tile changes, it will get redrawn anyway, you don''t have to loop through your tiles and say "are you different from last frame..? ah okay i will draw you then".

AND it is much faster (believe me!) than blitting from system->video.


That''s just my opinion. Please don''t flame me now.

If you need any more information don''t hesitate to ask!


wiseGuy

If your tile scrolling engine is going to scroll horizontally or vertically (not both) create a buffer that is double the size of the way you want to scroll. (horizontal scroller buffer would be [screen width*2,screen height])
If the engine is to scroll both horizontally and vertically, double buffer in both directions (buffer is [screen width*2,screen height*2])
As the viewport offset of the buffer changes, you draw only the borders of the viewport. The area in the center of the screen would only be changed if there are blits to be performed.

If you only created it 2 tiles more as you thought, you''d still have to draw the whole screen each time.

And as far as copying system mem to vid mem goes...
- The time spent copying system mem would be faster than redrawing the entire frame each time.
- Copy by DWORDs, not BYTEs.

(Of course this tile engine method is a generalization; if EVERY tile animates, redrawing the screen each time would be faster.)

quote:Original post by wise_Guy

That''s just my opinion. Please don''t flame me now.

If you need any more information don''t hesitate to ask!

wiseGuy

Hey wise_guy. There is no reason why you would get flamed from that idea, as I think it is definetly one of the best ways to go about it. For the simple reason, that you won''t have to store huge images in memory..