Tile Blitting Question

IMHO it depends on the way that you store and load your tiles. If you have all tiles grouped in one big bitmap, then go for the first method. OTOH, if you're loading your tiles from individual bitmap files to individual textures / surfaces, then use the second one. AFAIK, none of those methods is inheritely (is that a good word?) better than the other one (but #2 might be a little more memory demanding).

As for me, generally I'm storing my bitmaps / tiles / animations / particles etc. in separate files - I find it easier to edit them, add new ones and find pictures that I want. HTH :-)

Try blitting the individual tiles first, it's the easiest method and wastes the least memory but probably also the slowest. Prerendering the entire map onto a huge bitmap is a fast and easy method too if you can afford to waste the amount of memory required (and limit your maximum level size).
If neither method is efficient enough then you could try a relatively complex hybrid method instead.

If you blit the whole map onto one large surface for the entire map, you're just wasting valuable memory space. The blitting process is extremely fast and you shouldn't have to worry about blitting every tile, unless of course your tiles are single pixel sized.

Making a tile engine is a huge step, but can easily be accomplished with little work. You'll need a tile class, a map class and way to store a two-dimensional dynamic array (you can use my Multi-Dimensional Vector Class Wrappers if you want). Make up a function that will read in a text file and spit out a tilemap class. Everytime you draw the map, you'll have to offset by a camera object. It seems like a lot of work, but once you get it working, the opportunities are endless [wink].

actually you don't even need oo programming. i've done tiling engine for my game myself by studying others and thinking a bit. it doesn't require any directx or whatever, just win32 and c.

it's quite simple but a bit to large to describe it here so i'll just point you to the source so that you can examine it yourself. it's quite commented so you should be able to find your way around. in case you have any questions feel free to mail me.

http://piotr.monsmontis.net/queeneng.html

hope the link works. last time i linked to something it was broke

Thanks everybody, I already have made my own tile engine and I was just wondering which draw tiles function I should use for the engine. I guess I will try making a draw tiles function that just blits the actual tiles and not a tile buffer.