Tile Based Levels vs. Single Actor Levels

[mkeller]

A while back, I started making a platform game in Game Maker, and made the ground/platforms in a tile based manner, with each 48x48 pixel area of the world as a separate object. This ran quite smoothly, but it made the levels a little bit repetitive looking.

Now I'm porting the game to Game Editor, and from reading the documentation, it sounds like it might work to make the entire level as a single actor, with one enormous graphic for the ground. This would be much easier than tiles (allowing to use my graphics creation program for level design, rather than having to do it in GE, whose interface I'm not very comfortable with, yet), and would allow me to make the level much better looking, too, but I'm afraid that it might cause either gameplay lag, or slow loading times.

So, do any of you have any experience with this? Which runs/loads faster, for a level of a platform game: a single actor with a single huge graphic, or hundreds of clones of an actor, with smaller graphics? And which do you recommend?

[d-soldier]

I did this very thing in my first game, and did get some mild-lag in the gameplay. Of course, I used a large .png file with transparency rather then a large gif/jpg with one color transparency, which could have been the issue too. I would recommend finding a happy medium though. My current project is tile based, but the tile sets range from 200pixels all the way up to 800 pixels, which gives great ability to break the repetition of all same sized boxes, but has not seemed to hurt the gameplay. Or if you want to do the level as a whole, I would recommend breaking it up into three or four different images and making it a gif/jpg with one-color-transparency. Hope this was helpful.

[mkeller]

Okay, thanks!

What do you think is a good size limit (in pixels) for images ingame?

[ozziedave]

Hi mkeller,

I am just starting with "Game Editor", I think tiles is the hard way to go these days.

I am writing a game that uses 1024 x768 Graphics. Two placed horizontally
makes up one scrolling level for me at 65138 colours.

On porting to my GP2X like gameboy it runs quit smooth and fast, I am very happy
with the results.

Ozzie

[d-soldier]

It depends on the platform you intend to design the game for. If you are aiming for windows, I have found that 640x480 tiles work pretty fine, and the type of transparency used (be it single color[faster processing] or actual transparency [slower to process]), but with the GP2X I would reccomend nothing larger then 200x200 tiles limited to single-color transparency (for your tiled actors such as various ground sections, etc... The background sky and such would naturally be larger.

[ozziedave]

I realised after reading d-soldier's post that I should have said that
the graphics I was talking about were for Backgrounds.

I then place smaller tiles to make up platforms etc.

[Fuzzy]

ossie dave, you can have the platforms as part of the background and use filled actors overtop.