Largest TileMap Diplayed?
by Joe Doyle · in Torque Game Builder · 08/01/2005 (9:12 am) · 9 replies
Hi everyone,
In playing around with T2D I had a question on some limits that I seem to be hitting. I think it has to do with the maximum texture size on my video card, but I thought I would throw it out to the crowd to see what everyone else thought.
I made a TileMap with one layer and a size of 500 x 500. I fill it with images and save it. When I load it up as my main tile set I specify a TileSize of 8 x 8. The tiles display fine, but its not showing all of them. It shows all of the tiles in the upper left corner, but clips the lower right corner. If I lower the TileSize to 4 x 4, I see more tiles, but the lower right corner still gets clipped. It appears to be clipping them based on my maximum texture size of 4096x4096 (GeForce 6800 GT). Is this correct?
The tile editor loads and displays the level fine, but when shown as a normal tilemap it gets clipped.
My goal is to have a single large world for a top-down RPG. I was planning on creating a tile-paging system and I'm just testing out what would work best for tilemap sizes. I'll also accept any suggestions that might help me out.
Thanks,
Joe
In playing around with T2D I had a question on some limits that I seem to be hitting. I think it has to do with the maximum texture size on my video card, but I thought I would throw it out to the crowd to see what everyone else thought.
I made a TileMap with one layer and a size of 500 x 500. I fill it with images and save it. When I load it up as my main tile set I specify a TileSize of 8 x 8. The tiles display fine, but its not showing all of them. It shows all of the tiles in the upper left corner, but clips the lower right corner. If I lower the TileSize to 4 x 4, I see more tiles, but the lower right corner still gets clipped. It appears to be clipping them based on my maximum texture size of 4096x4096 (GeForce 6800 GT). Is this correct?
The tile editor loads and displays the level fine, but when shown as a normal tilemap it gets clipped.
My goal is to have a single large world for a top-down RPG. I was planning on creating a tile-paging system and I'm just testing out what would work best for tilemap sizes. I'll also accept any suggestions that might help me out.
Thanks,
Joe
#2
08/01/2005 (10:42 pm)
This is not a video card problem... I think you are just confused about how tilemap sizing should work... but don't feel bad, it's complicated until you get the hang of it. The rendering clips to the total size of the tilemap, so if you have 100x100 tiles, each 8x8, you would need a tilemap of 800x800 in order to show the entire thing. If you have a tilemap of 500x500 units and 8x8 tiles, then the most tiles you could draw (without clipping) would be 62.5x62.5. Does that make sense? Melv posted a topic explaining this pretty early on. You might want to search for it. 
#4
I have an issue that is central to the game I am working on as described here...
www.torquepowered.com/community/forums/viewthread/114441
Any information would be greatly appreciated, trying to figure out if there is any way to increase our tilemap size, or if we need to change our design document or coding conventions to keep our design as planned.
05/07/2010 (4:51 pm)
I am trying to find information regarding the maximum allowable tilemap size in TGB. The link listed above by Joe Doyle no longer exists and I cannot find any documentation on what the maximum tilemap size is that will still display correctly. I have an issue that is central to the game I am working on as described here...
www.torquepowered.com/community/forums/viewthread/114441
Any information would be greatly appreciated, trying to figure out if there is any way to increase our tilemap size, or if we need to change our design document or coding conventions to keep our design as planned.
#5
05/11/2010 (5:23 pm)
Any chance anyone has any information on the largest tilemap that can be displayed, and if it can be tweaked? 
#6
05/12/2010 (4:43 am)
Rather than one large tilemap, you could link together multiple, smaller tilemaps in a grid format. The transitions would be seamless and not noticeable to the player.
#7
Who knows we may go that route or we may change our game design to work within the current tilemap size limits that we are finding.
I was just hoping for a tweak that would allow taller tilemaps , since ours are tall but not nearly as wide.
05/12/2010 (6:10 pm)
Thanks for the response Kevin. I was thinking about the possibility of using multiple tilemaps, but its a bit of a pain for me. We are using the tilemap as our level layout, and there is a lot of script code that would need to be touched, in addition to the custom changes I made to the A* pathfinding code to work with our game. It would be possible, but a lot of work and we are not sure if its worth it. Who knows we may go that route or we may change our game design to work within the current tilemap size limits that we are finding.
I was just hoping for a tweak that would allow taller tilemaps , since ours are tall but not nearly as wide.
#8
05/12/2010 (8:11 pm)
Yes, a grid format is something I would prefer to begin a project with instead rewriting existing code to work with such a fundamental change. Good luck!
#9
05/13/2010 (2:56 pm)
Thanks for the help Kevin, I think we will alter our game design unless a solution to this is found. Sort of kicking myself that I didn't test the largest tilemaps in our design first thing, ah hindsight. 
Torque Owner Chris "Hyena" Vogel