[LivingTheDream]

Hello all, long time no talk!

I am in the midst of my design doc for a 2d Side Scrolling game, like Super Mario (just a learning game for myself) and came upon some stuff I'd like to see if I could get some help with. Since I am trying to learn this stuff, I'd rather not have someone give me code, just kinda nudge me in the right direction with how to do some stuff.

I searched the forums for information on a map editor - but I don't see someone doing the same stuff that I wanted to do. I don't think I need to do tiles or anything, unless I'm wrong. I need to write a map editor (or level editor would be more correct I guess), and was thinking "Should I just save it as a bunch of text, or binary or something, and parse it into useful information on runtime? Or am I looking at this completely wrong, maybe there's a better way to write a level."

I appreciate any help you guys can give!

[Bucky7]

It would depend on what you want to achieve. A tile based system is good and you could redraw each tile per frame if you have a lot of background annimation. if not you could build up an entire level in memory and just blit down the current visual portion. There are some good mario examples on the forum if you look.

[wyrd]

I know you didn't want code, but it may be worth looking at some if you're stumped. Here's a Mario clone that someone built a while ago;

http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/show...threadid=27443

I haven't looked at the code, but I'm going to assume he used a tile based map of sorts. The reason I say this is that drawing a single large image on to the screen is slower then tons of smaller tiles (hard to believe, but it's true). If you're looking for examples there are some tile based map editors floating around the forums.. a search should pull them up. There should also be some tile based map tutorials that you can find with a quick search on google.

As for maps, text format should be okay unless you plan on doing some really large levels, in which case you may want to consider using binary to speed up the load time. However, binary is hard to debug, so if you run into a problem with your map loading/saving it may take a while to track down the exact problem. Since you're just learning I'd suggest sticking with text for now and then convert it to binary later on when you get all the kinks worked out.

[hotrodx]

LivingTheDream,

Well, since my old Mario game was linked, I'd like to invite you to check out my site at www.angelfire.com/games4/hotrodx for a newer Mario game. No bosses or powerups, but very playable.