mimic original "retro" hardware: tiles question.

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a video game according to the specs of the Nintendo Gameboy Color. The original hardware uses up to a 32x32 grid of 8x8 tiles to form the background image. Each tile can have up to 4 colors.

My question is would it be more efficient, performance-wise, to create a single 256x256 background image matching this spec (creating the tiles in something like PyxelEdit and exporting the full image,) or would creating the background with 32x32 separate tiles work better? Or is the performance difference negligible between the two methods? I should mention this game will NOT be released as a mobile game; PC only.

File size could potentially be smaller with the tile-based approach, but it would also increase the amount of sprites on the screen which could possibly cause some slowdowns.

I appreciate your help!

Thanks :)

Dustin

I still think C2 needs a better way to handle tileset maps. Yes you have 32x32 (1024) sprites on screen, but there could be an object with better performance than a sprite for that task. Maybe something like a Background object with animations.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Yeah something barebones with non-animated frames, no collisions, effects, etc would be great. I keep finding myself drawn towards the Tiled Background object, but... no separate frames.

I figured a single image would probably be better in Construct 2. And file size isn't really that big of a deal these days (especially an image this small.) I'll take a peek through the 3rd party plugins, though. Maybe there's something in there.

Thanks :)

The recently added Sprite Font plugin seems like something in the ways of what I have in mind. It slices an image into tiles that you can use. This would be a good base for a Tile object

Nice! Good thinking.

I just loaded in a test tileset, set the character width/height to 8x8 and started typing. I like how word wrapping is on by default so all you need to do for the next line is hit space.

This would definitely be a good base. I'll have to brush up on some js and see if I can whip up anything useful.

Thanks for the tip :)

Here's a somewhat related thread on tiles:

http://www.scirra.com/forum/for-those-whove-made-tile-engines_topic70144.html