Looking for best method to background really large worlds

mattkw80

Hello -

Can anyone give me some advice on the best method for making large backgrounds? I've been doing tile maps, but I'm not sure that's the most optimized way of going about it.

My tile sets are 32x32.

To give you some idea of how large.... picture Terarria or Starbound and you are sitting at the bottom most floor of the world. I want to allow the player to 'fly' or travel from all the way down there.... up to street level.... into the sky, and then finally into the atmosphere. I'm making huge rooms so that - that travel takes quite a bit of time.

Should I be cutting my background png's into really large chunks and tiling them - or continue on with tile maps... painting on 32x32 background sprites of earth and sky?

ZoeyZanidoo

@mattkw80 said: Can anyone give me some advice on the best method for making large backgrounds? I've been doing tile maps, but I'm not sure that's the most optimized way of going about it.

I'm new but I have also been working mostly with tilemaps, 32x32 tiles. Because I randomly generate my maps anything higher then 250x250 cells is too slow right now to make and I have done two passes now to speed things up(though I am sure there is more I can do). It sounds like you are handcrafting this though, so In Terraria a small map is 4200 × 1200. I took the time and generated a 500x500 map in my game, which is still barebones, solid color graphics limited tiles etc. Even zoomed in it is slow and laggy with movement. There are only 5 nodes loaded along with the tilemap and I have a decent gaming desktop.

Maybe you could split your world into several scenes and load them when the cameras view nears the edge?

Should I be cutting my background png's into really large chunks and tiling them

Tilemaps already do that with quadrants if I am not mistaken.