Man its been a while since I've even thought about Tile engines

I cant really contribute to this, as I did ALL of my tile map engines like this:

3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3

3,0,0,0,1,2,0,0,3

3,8,6,0,1,1,1,0,3

3,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,3

3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3

and would use a matrix like that, and layers, bottom layer for tile graphic, middle layer for entities, top layer for collision.

I kind of like how you've parametrized the maps though, that's very interesting

As the previous user posted, you should really switch to a binary format. That way, you can create a structure for storing a tile information, then it's just a matter of creating an array of this and loading/saving it in one go. It will not only be faster, but will also save a lot of space.

Binary formats are not necessarily faster and they have a bazillion other drawbacks. Disk seek time will completely swamp any CPU processing time. Text files can in many cases compress better than binary equivalents and so (using a ZIP asset file or zlib to compress your source assets) you can actually get faster loading time with text than binary. To be sure, measure, measure, measure.

It is very common to use text file formats especially chosen to be easy to inspect and merge in source control for development and then use an asset pipeline to convert that to a "final" form for shipping. In early development, there's no reason to even think about that final form or efficiency. Just make it work. Make the format easy to work with. Your time is significantly more limited and precious than the computer's time. I'm sure you have a 1000 things your game desperately needs more than faster tile loading right now.

Text files can in many cases compress better than binary equivalents and so (using a ZIP asset file or zlib to compress your source assets) you can actually get faster loading time with text than binary. To be sure, measure, measure, measure.

I think he means storing the entire map data in binary, like in copy the data instead of read the configure file, interpret it and create the data.
Not actually storing the config in a binary file.

edit: No, apparently he doesn't. Forget what I said.
Indeed, it may or may not give you an increased load speed.

Never witnessed a situation where it actually lost performance though.

Thank you all for the replies.

Looks like the binary way would be a needed solution to my problem.
Vortez, is this what they call serialization or am i mistaken ?

I currently have a class CTileInfo that contain:
int row
int col
int frontrow
int frontcol
int state
SDL_RendererFlip flip //(can be an int)
SDL_RendererFlip frontflip
string walksound
string script //(script need the same tokenization before they can be processed)
vector<CVector> *vertices
I never done that before, im unsure how to proceed. I'll give google a go.

I strongly advise against your use of strings.

You can use some sort of numeric reference instead (like an std::vector or even an [ int , string ] matrix).

This way, you can avoid loading and creating all the same strings multiple times, and also makes your life easier when you want to store the map in a binary format. Whenever you need the string, look it up in your matrix, and you're good to go.

Also, avoid the using namespace std statement.

I'll cook a little snippet for you in a moment.

Starting test for a [7500, 7500] wide set.
Searching for a big enough memory block (450 mb )
Creating the map manually.
Saving the map to the files.
Will now Load the map from the files.

Total Time for each of the tasks -
    Manual Creation:        1.16 s
    Save to TEXT file:      48.12 s
    Save to BINARY file:    0.61 s
    Load from TEXT file:    22.27 s
    Load from BINARY file:  0.18 s
Total Time:                 72.34 s

Vortez, is this what they call serialization or am i mistaken ?

Humm, i never tried serialization, but it's similar. The thing with your example is that, there is too much information irrelevent to saving and loading your file. You don't need the x and y, you need to store it's width and height (to calculate the number of tiles), but since that information is only needed once, you dont need to include it in the structure either. Im not very good to explain things so let me give you an example:

struct CTile {
	int state; //? <-- not sure this should be there, but i dont know what it does...
        int texture_id;   // those complicate things a bit, you will have to make sure they always
	int walksound_id; // get assigned the same id
	int script_id;    
};

struct CTilesMap {
	int Width, Height;
	CTile *pTiles;
};

class CTilesManager
{
public:
	CTilesMap TilesMap;

	bool LoadMap(char *fname);	
	void SaveMap(char *fname);

	bool LoadScripts();
	bool LoadSounds();
...
}


bool CTilesManager::LoadMap(char *fname)
{
	FILE *f = fopen(fname, "rb");
	if(f){
		
		// Read the width and heigh of the map
		fread(TilesMap.Width,  1, sizeof(int), f);
		fread(TilesMap.Height, 1, sizeof(int), f);
	
		// Calculate the number of tiles from that
		int NumTiles = TilesMap.Width * TilesMap.Height;

		// Make sure the tiles aren't already allocated
		if(pTiles)
			return false;

		// Allocate memory to hold the tiles data
		pTiles = new CTile[TilesMap.Width][TilesMap.Height];

		// Load the rest of the file
		fread(pTiles, 1, sizeof(CTile) * NumTiles, f);

		fclose(f);

		return true;
	}

	return false;
}

Of course, this is very sketchy and i had a little trouble writting the code because the code is not mine, it's yours, but it should give you an idea about how to load binary files and structure your code. Also, scripts will need to be loaded using text file, and sound are generally binary, but should't be mixed with the map data imo, so that's why i provided 2 extra loader functions. The vertices could be calculated all at once when your done loading the map and know it's size.

If your a beginer it will probably seem overwhelming at first, but as i said, that's code is just to show you the general idea about how I would do it, and i wrote it in 5-10 mins so dont take it too seriously and use whatever method you like.