Thanks everyone for the input so far!
Ashley True, it would cause edge glitches in some cases, but the artist could keep those to a minimum if they know the limitations. Right now, I use a method I haven't seen discussed on the forum yet. I replace all tiles in a tilemap with a single sprite and set its animation frame to that of the tile ID. The frame in the sprite is the same as the tile map except that it overlaps adjacent tiles by one pixel. because I want to use pixel graphics I enlarge them by a scale of 4 that way linear as opposed to point doesn't mess them up. The result is ultra clean pixel art that I can rotate and scale arbitrarily. It takes a lot of time at the moment, cutting up a tile map, enlarging the border so it has an overlap of 1px plus a 1px transparent border. But I can make some code to do that via .net It is not without its limitations of course. You have to know exactly what tiles can go together or you get some weird seaming still. It, unfortunately, is necessary in my game. I need scaling and rotation of the entire screen. I want to use tilemaps because they are a quick way of making a scene for the game, though, at this point I only use block 0 and another script auto-maps the correct tiles.
At this point, I am okay with this workaround, but I figured the workaround could be made more efficient if construct helped out with the process. I know it is less efficient, but I figured its no different than a game that doesn't even use a grid (like aquaria). Can I get away with something of that nature and scale?
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TLDR: Ashley, is it too inefficient to not use the tile map but have a series of objects instead? Or will this be bad on lower end machines. I am targeting pc and so could care less about mobile. I already have to many things I need to make mobile not an option. Also, Thanks for the great work on construct! I have thought along time about the time map and can't think of a solution that is perfect either. It is a very complex problem.
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Joannesalfa - you can get full screen quite easily with the tile map object like this (this does have some limitations/weaknesses depending on what you want:
1. Set the project to use crop
2. at the start of the game check the window size
3. Depending on how you want the game to scale (inner or outer) and what the minimum playing field is you do some math and arrive at a zoom level or scale factor (0-n) rounded to the nearest whole number (whether you go up or down depends on what you want and how you calculate it)
4. Set the layout scale to this number and viola.
The weakness of course is when you end up with a scale of near n.5 - you either have to cut a lot off or add a lot to the game giving a very wide range of potential screen sizes to work with.