Mmmmm. Yes. And since my terrain map does not use too many tiles, having a duplicate of each would really not have too much of an impact.

Thanks again!!!

Here''s a suggestion for fog of war that''s a bit different from the ones previously mentioned. It does require a bit more muscle on the processing side to run smoothly, but in an efficiently coded engine, it looks pretty nice. Instead of giving the tiles in your map the FOG_IN/OUT property, make an entire layer on your map for the fog. Whenever drawing the map, do it so that the entire map is fogged. In other words, draw the entire screen with a darkening filter. Or, just load your map at the beginning of the game darkened. Then, use your object array to draw a fading ''lightening'' circle around each object that should clear the fog of war, with a radius equal to that object''s visibility range. The effect is that the fog does not look ''tiley'', but smooth. There is no impact on memory, because you''re using data that you would need in the game anyways, but like I said earlier, it eats a lot of processing time if you have many units on the screen. However, with a bit of optimization, the effect really pays off, and makes the game look more polished. For one thing, you could make your visibility ranges in set denominations, and load the different circles in the background, then add the preloaded images on top of the objects, instead of recalculating them each time. I''m currently working on a multiplayer online RTS engine for java, and I''m implementing this method. It runs OK with a fast system under JRE, so it should run fine in a language more suitable for graphic-intensive games.

--kcigam