I've actually toyed with a game system using two values per tile. One is the elevation, and the other the type of ground cover.

0-9 elevations

r=rocky, f=forest, g=grassy, w=water, etc.

This allows for a slightly more complex computation for movement, as movement is normally slower uphill than down, and a game engine could even use the map to figure trajectory differences for missile weapons to nearby tiles and things like that.

As for using a DB instead of a flat file of keeping it all in memory, I was planning on putting regions encoded like the above into the database, and pulling entire regions from the database into memory when needed, so say you could have a 16-by-16 or 32-by-32 region that gets pulled out when someone is within a certain number of tiles from it, or when someone actually enters it if the game doesn't allow multi-tile vision (depends on style of game and granularity of land areas depicted by the tiles).

I've worked quite a bit in this area, and I'm always happy to talk about it. I may even be interested in joining a project if that's an option. Perl is a good language for this type of game because of the ease of manipulating the data structures in different ways.

In reply to Re: Re: Map Storage For Game by mr_mischief
in thread Map Storage For Game by dooberwah

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.