(Tried to find an e-mail for you somewhere but I couldn’t. Please delete this later)

Because too many quality blog entries on development are lost in the vastness of the web, Code Project is bringing together the best to give them the exposure they deserve. Code Project has 6.5 million members browsing 26,200 articles, each article having hundreds of views daily.

I’ve been looking at your blog and there are some phenomenal entries (like this one) that we’d love to have on Code Project.

Just blog away, and a version of whatever entries you choose will appear on Code Project as well with a link back to your entry on your blog.

I’d be happy to give you the details (http://www.codeproject.com/scr.....ogFAQ.aspx), or answer any questions you might have.

Thanks,
Sean Ewington
Content Manager
The Code Project

Only just got my head round the “Tile Map” tutorial and if you struggled, I’m probably not going to try GL_TRIANGLE_STRIPS… just yet.

Appreciate the update and will definitely check this out on my next project. Thankfully my current game doesn’t use the a Tile map so that performance issue is one I can avoid (for now).

Simon

what were the issues with the textures?
I would assume your texture you are applying to the tile’s will get the one texture stretched across all the tiles at once?

Btw just to note for my above post, I am making quite a different game to your tutorials i more read the code to see the OO approach you take :D
so how i do things may not apply to yor game :)

You make an interesting observation and its the same one I had used when I was not rendering tiles that would not be seen. For my entities, I’m also not checking to see if they are visible or not. I was doing this from the start with my entities because of the way I am spawning them.

I wanted the player to always have baddies around him to deal with, but I didn’t want to have to fill my map with baddies. My solution was to get the entities to check how far away they are in tiles from the player. If this exceeds a certain distance then the entity changes state to dead and my spawning code then picks it up again and spawns it again near the player.

This means I can give the player a hard time with only 5 entities in the entire game :o). Imagine the player is walking about surrounded by a swarm of flies moving with him. That is how my entities are working.

This has been working well and means I’ve not been checking if they are on screen or not as if they aren’t on screen, its not for long and with so few entities it does not add any overhead at all really.

At the moment I’m not sure that the method I described in the post would work well for dynamic entities such as baddies as they are changing all the time. But for anything that is static i.e. its location is defined by changing the world coordinates and not its own vertices then the solution works well.

For the tile class, as you say, this is a perfect fit as I’m never changing the tile vertices themselves :o)

I hope that makes sense.

Mike

If you have an if statement lets say that checks to see if the object you might want to draw is outside the boundaries of your current view, and if it is it won’t do anything.
If it is in the boundaries of your current view then you will enter the loop and bind the vertex data and draw the vertex’s.

Surley if that if statement isnt there you will be wasting time by binding the vertex data and then drawing the vertex?
Even if the GPU goes through the program and doesn’t draw what isn’t on the screen surley you will have wasted alot more time by binding the vertex data than the time to do one if statement check?

I see you said this is for your tile class, but im just checking because maybe for your tile class your current method would work well where it may be difficult to check an individual tile but for units (creatures, character) where you may know there x,y co-ordinate you could do an if statement on the current view and there position to see if they need to be left out. And i would assume this would be alot faster than what you have currently said.

I’m just saying this incase you turn round and prove me wrong and i learn something :D
But i am expecting you to say “It’s just for the tile class” if so then it’s an awesome technique to use.

Thanks,

Tony