Hey all,
I have been making an RPG for a long time now and it's really going great. All my systems are in place and working fine (which took months!) and I have an amazing artist who has done heaps of characters and some layouts. Only problem is, we have just started drawing the art for the different layouts and quickly ran into trouble when it came to the main town (which is by far the biggest layout in the game).
The artist is making 1 main image for the background then placing other items like houses on top. This works fine for 1 screen images, but on big layouts there are a few problems (layout details: 10,000 x 8,000. Window size: 1360 x 1020). First off the max image size is 2,000 x 2,000, so we need to cut up the image into several pieces. But then, the loading times go way up and the music skips when entering a big layout, as well as the game freezing for a moment whenever a new piece comes on screen.
So I tried making them only appear when you get within a certain range which did help load times, but still caused the game to freeze a little when they appear.
I will soon try cutting it up into much smaller tiles and have them load/destroy depending on distance to the player, but I expect there to be some big slowdown issues having heaps of items on screen and constantly being created and destroyed.
Also I am aware of the tiled background object, but I really want to avoid that as I want to take full advantage of my artist who can create full layouts, completely customised and unique. Since the game is very small (for an RPG), custom drawing every layout is not hard both financially and time wise. So I would really like to take advantage of that.
So yeah, if you have any solutions or suggestions please let me know! I am very passionate about this project and I want to get it as smooth as possible.