RPG map sizing

Hello,

Wondering if anyone has an idea for reducing the lag caused by a large map sprite.

I was considering chopping it up into smaller sprites, then setting the sections visible to the players location. so at any given time, only 4 of 20 map sprites were being drawn. would this help? or would it be better to just cut the map into smaller sprites and display all?

I could destroy instances of the sprites, then spawn when needed?

Thanks!

Also, I will be using a lot of solid "block" sprites to section off the walkable areas. is there a better method than this?

Your best off I think with your second solution. If your sprite is THAT big. chop it up and place it in a grid to be displayed. Let C2 do the culling work for object outside the viewport. Also when chopping your map make sure to chop them into the standard binary exponent.

1x1

2x2

4x4

8x8

16x16

32x32

64x64

128x128

256x256

512x512

1024x1024

Also don't forget that 0 counts as 1. so it would be 255x255

Thanks for the advice! I will give it a shot and test it out.

How are you making your maps? If you're using just one big tiled background object for it I highly highly highly recommend you don't do that. Instead, you should build your maps out of smaller bitesized objects; a combination of sprites and tiled background objects is the method I use. Keeps filesize and loading down and performance up.

Here is an example of the type of map I'm going for (using RPG maker to rough out my maps initially).

So you would recommend using a repeating tiled background for the water, and maybe cut the land portions down into 256x256 segments perhaps?

<img src="http://portacannongame.blogspot" border="0" />

I have a picture on my website here (that one didn't seem to work):

portacannongame.blogspot.ca