ok heres the deal, i have been programming on my calculator for some time, and recently have decided to make a complex spirite based RPG (kinda why i found this site) and i have the battle enginge done and everyt5hing works fine, but now i wanna actualy make a GAME out of it...

now in order to do that i need to learn how to use tile maps

ive read the xlib 0.3 readme and the section on tilemaps looks like greek to me lol

does anyone know of any tutorials i could read to help me learn how to actualy use tilemaps?

thx for any help at all

lol in truth i have never used them and the only thing i know is that its a fast way of drawing lotsa sprites to make RPG worlds out of lol

and thx for the welcome!, i plan to visit lots in the new year, this seems like a realy great community, and those are getting harder and harder to find these days!

i'll help too, basically, when making a game, if u have a screen, u don't wanna draw all sprites out with sprite command. Instead, u can use a matrix(2d array) that contains all different sprites, then draw the whole thing on screen at once. How xlib's tilemap works is u specify pic data like sprite, first 8*8 sprite in top left corner in sprite 0, one sprite to the right would be sprite 1, etc...Now in ur matrix, u can put the sprite number in, so when display tilemap, itll display that tile. Hope i make sense
as for tutorials, this is kinda weird, but reading Kevin's (xlibmans) grayscale tutorial helped me understand tilemaps a little, so try that out.

Before xlib, if you wanted to draw a tilemap with a matrix, you had to do something like this:

[code]
For(B,1,matrix_height
For(A,1,matrix_width
If [A](B,A) /= 0
draw_sprite_number_[A](B,A)
End
End

But xlib does this automatically, in less than a second, where before it would take several seconds just to draw one screen. So  to get an idea of what numbers to put in your matrix, you should have a picture containing all your sprites. The first row is sprites -12, from left to right. The next row has 12-23, then it goes on like that, until you hit sprite 95 in the bottom right corner. Each of these sprites must be 8x8 (though a new version of xLib is coming out soon that also supports tilemaps with 16x16 sprites- for now, just use multiple 8x8 sprites to make one 16x16 sprite).

In case you need a little more help here it is:

Basiclly you have a matrix
c1-->

CODE

ec1 [[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]  [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1]  [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1]  [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1]  [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1]  [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1]  [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1]  [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]]->[A]c2

-->

CODE

ec1 real(2,0,0,0,12,8,0,12,0,8,0,0,1;matches up matrix [A] with pic 0 and draws the tile mapc2