World Tiles: 1 Sheet per theme VS 1 Sheet to rule them all

[vecima]

Hi there, RI Community!

I'm back with another question (I feel like this board exists just for me lately ;] ).

I'm trying to decide if I want to continue with the RI tradition of putting world tiles onto sheets for each level theme that are 512x256, or if it would be feasible to put all world tiles onto a single sheet.

Are there memory advantages to the split up approach?  I guess you may only need to load 1 - 3 sheets per level for a total of 1536x256, whereas putting all of the game's world tiles could be 3 or 4 times that amount.

Is that a big enough problem to make it worth avoiding?  The main reason I'm even considering using one sheet for all tiles is that I'm putting a level editor into our game and I feel like if possible I'd like the users to be able to mash themes together in creative ways within a single tile layer.  If the technical cost is too great I'll forgo it, but thought I'd ask if anyone had ideas before I wasted too much time implementing the approach.

Thanks in advance!

Eric

[Chris Pruett]

Hi Eric,

These days it’s fine to use larger textures.  Back when I wrote Replica Island, the goal was to be able to batch entire layers together, so the tileset was supposed to be just one world map.  But these days you can load textures that are a whole lot larger without any real detriment.  Just make sure that you stick to power-of-2 sizes: 1024, 2048, 4096, etc.  A single 4096x4096 can hold all of the tiles in Replica Island several times over!

Chris

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[Leo Cedric]

HI Vecima, Hi Chris

just to Thank you for Keeping this forum "Breathing" and continuing adding of thoughtful and useful information.

"Replica Island" still is a great source of inspiration and learning.

kind regards