Tile Recommendations?

[Sean Doherty]

What tile size and how many tiles wuld people recommend? My application is a 360 degree space shooter and I trying to figure out what makes sense from a memory perspective:

Assume space is 4000 by 4000 and all tiles in all layers will be the same size.

1) What size space tiles would people recommend?
2) How many unique tiles?
3) How many unique layers?

Why?

Thanks

[Sharkbait]

In the 16-bit days, 16x16 pixel tiles where almost the de-facto size for 320x240 resolutions so if I where aiming for 640x480 I'd simply double the size. Smaller tiles generally mean less tile combinations and hence better use of memory. The downside is you have more work to build your levels and you have to keep the overheads of individual tiles to a minimum, namely, if you're rendering using 3D hardware keep your tiles on one or more tilesheets to minimise texture objects.

That said, it really depends on your game's requirements. For example, if your player avatar and most of your enemies are about 64x64 pixels in size, it might make more sense to adopt this as the size of your tiles to simplify collision.

[Anthony Flack]

It really depends on the sort of terrian you're trying to depict, and how it will function in the game...

Imagine the objects you want to show. Maybe do a little sketch of some of them on screen. Now imagine making them out of tiles. What would be the most useful size?

[digriz]

If you're looking at it from a memory usage perspective, then you need to try and figure out whether many of the tiles will be reusable.

If you have a lot of reusable tiles then you might be able to get away with making them larger in size. If there are more unique, then they might need to be smaller. This would help with cramming more images into vram. This will help with speed purposes.

The other option is to build a tile renderer that will accept different sizes. ie. 64x64 or 128*128 or variations on that.

And as Anthony quite rightly says, it does depend on how they function in the game too. Plan it out on paper first, but writing a flexible tile engine will allow you play around with various sizes.

In previous games that i've written with tiling for backgrounds, i've employed a method where i can reject certain tiles if they are very similar to other tiles. I did this on machines where the memory of the videocard was extremely low. Grass and gravel textures are good for this.

[Sean Doherty]

Hmmm,

I am kind of thinking that you would not want tiles smaller than 256 by 256 for a 360 degree space shooter? What do you think?

Thanks