Re: [pygame] Big Scrolling Surfaces

[Kris Schnee <kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Rene Dudfield wrote:
> Are you reusing surfaces in any of these?  Or is each tile unique?

Each "zone" is a 2D list of tile numbers, each of which refers to a 
piece of a single "tileset" image. So for instance, a sea is a large 
number of identical water tiles. I managed to get an automatic tileset 
loader that figures out how many 64x64 tiles fit in an image and gets a 
list of clipping rectangles for them all.

> As long as you don't use up the real memory of your user it should be
> fine. On the other hand you could flip sections onto and off of the HD
> as needed just like you do your zones but an outer circle around your
> current 9 zones.

I've got something like that -- the list of what tile goes where is kept 
in memory for lots of zones, while only the 3x3 zone area around the 
current zone (ie. what the player can see plus the immediate area) is 
actually drawn. I might trim that to half a zone on either side instead 
of a full zone, but you're right -- modifying the system further is 
probably not necessary.

Kris