Tiled Maps?

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Tiled Maps?

Poita(Posted 2005) [#1]
I've been playing around with the blitzmax demo for ages now and have come back to blitz3d to do some 3d stuff so I'm a little rusty with it.

Anyway, I'm gonna try and make a kind of rpg/rts type game with 3d maps (obviously) and I was wondering if having tiled entities to represent the maps is an efficient way of creating maps or should I just have one huge mesh for the map? Terrains aren't versatile enough to create the maps I want.

Thanks in advance


VP(Posted 2005) [#2]
Tiled entities will give you more scope for having very large maps. If you've ever seen Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on consoles, then you will know what I mean.

For those who haven't seen the game, the whole map is built from reusable square terrain 'tiles'. They link together nicely (can't see the joins) and you can make your maps extremely large, much like a 2D tiled scrolling game. Very efficient use of resources too.


Poita(Posted 2005) [#3]
Thanks very much.

How do you go about using them?

Do I hide all the tiles that are off-screen?
How many tiles per screen would be an efficient amount? (I'm not too bothered if it's only a few but the more the merrier :D )


VP(Posted 2005) [#4]
How you use them? No idea, I haven't written anything remotely approaching 3D yet :)

From what I recall, there are probably 6x6 tiles visible, though this can vary because you can alter the height of tiles to build mountainous regions. If your viewpoint is from above and angled slightly and your character is at the top of a cliff, you can probably see a lot of tiles. BG:DA ran on an Xbox or PS2 at 60Hz without slowdown, so B3D should be able to handle a similar system.

Have a Google for Dark Alliance (there was also a sequel) screenshots and see if you can spot how they built their maps.


Jams(Posted 2005) [#5]
We've got this kind of system running in our current project, lots of 3d terrain 'tiles' linked together to make a larger map. It's an extremely efficent way of doing things, the map size is virtually infinite but atm we're rendering < 2000 polys on the terrain at any time.

"Do I hide all the tiles that are off-screen?"
Blitz will do that for you :)

Our tiles are faily large, 1 tile will take up about a quarter of the screen. The other great advantage of tiled 3d terrains is collision detection, you only need to enable collision detection on the tile that you're characters are currently standing on...


Poita(Posted 2005) [#6]
Thanks a lot folks