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If I am building my level from a text file

0,0,0,0,0 0,1,0,1,0 0,2,1,0,0 0,0,0,0,0

and I want to draw a large image, how do I go about doing that? do I take the image, separate it in tiles (the same size as the other ones) and then add a value to each image

0,1,2,3,4,5,6 0,7,8,9,10,11,12

or is there another way to do this? Lets say I want to add a house, or a something like this ship?

enter image description here

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Old-school RPG engines like that typically render 2 or more layers of tile maps, f.e.:

  • Ground layer (below sprites; roads, floor, etc.)
  • Upper layer (above sprites; stuff in front; the upper part of the ship in your image)

This allows sprites to walk behind stuff on the upper layer. So in your text file, you'd define 2 layers per tilemap, f.e.:

// ground layer 1,1,1,1,1, 1,2,2,1,1, 1,2,2,1,1, 1,1,1,1,1, // upper layer 0,0,0,0,0, 0,3,0,0,3, 0,4,3,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0

(I'd recommend using 0 as "no tile")

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  • \$\begingroup\$ very nice, so if this was a house instead of a boat, I would make some of the house tiles on the ground layers, and the rest on the upper layer. And if my house was really large (with 20 different tiles) I would set aside 20 numbers (20-40) as large house tiles \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 6, 2012 at 21:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ Yeah. If you have a lot of large graphics of which parts aren't reused, you could consider including arbitrarily sized tiles (although probably with dimensions that are integer multiples of a single tile), at the cost of adding some complexity to the engine/renderer. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 6, 2012 at 22:00

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