Uh... yet Game Programming... or Is there a way to buildtilemap graphics in

[Jeremy Smith]

I once made a Role Playing game in metacard, back then I used a background 
(group) that had buttons sized 64x64 pixels filling the whole screen (ended 
up with over a hundred buttons). I programmed a scripting language that 
would save and load files which contained the icons and name/label of all 
the buttons, so in other words these files were the maps, each time i went 
to a new screen i would load a map which would create a whole new screen 
while only using a few tiles over and over again. Eventually i was able to 
load another map while still displaying part of the other map, this allowed 
for smooter scrolling.

The name/label of the buttons were saved as if the game character was within 
a button and it had a special name it would look that name up in a list and 
do an action, usually something like 'load,map12,5,6" so if the game 
character walked into that button it would load the map file map12 and place 
the character at location 12,6.

So you eventually end up programming your game with your own customized 
scripting language and not metacard/revoltion. This will work for most 
games, platform games are a step up in difficultly from the top-down ones, 
when i did a platform game i usually displayed a large graphic as the 
background and placed invisible buttons as ledges for the game character, 
the scrolling was much smoother and the game was more optimized as 
platformers require more speed than your typical top-down / isometric game.

Cheers.
Jeremy.

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