I have some questions relating to tile-based game engines. 1) How do I split the screen up into squares and efficiently put bitmaps into each square. I have done this already, but 64 (8x8) surfaces is stoopid! 2) How do I set flags for a tile along the lines of: flags = WALKABLE / ITEM / TILEID_GRASS; etc... Cheers for any help ppl!

You may want to download my tile engine source code at http://www.untergrund-spiele.de/mainstream/downloads/tileengine.zip - It shows how to load your tiles into one surface and calculate the RECTs for any tile.

Answers:

1) it''s spelled "stupid" . Anyway, building an array of MxN is your only option, pretty much. 64 Bytes isn''t that much . Heck, 64KB isn''t that much. Dont worry about it. Tile maps taking up too much memory isn''t something which happens often .

2) Sort of ugly. Basically, you need to do something like this:

#define Flag1 0x01
#define Flag2 0x02
#define Flag3 0x04
#define Flag4 0x08

As you probably know, to fill a flag variable you do this:
flag = Flag1 / Flag3; //sets on flags 1 and 3

To read back the values, though, you do this:

/* code reads out value of flag 1, to read value of any other flag you''d just substitute it''s flag there */
flagvalue = Flag1 & flagsvariable;

--TheGoop