The back story for this node is that for the past while, I've been messing about with writing my very own 16bit rpg (think snes). I've gotten most of the image generation code working properly and so forth, so I can draw my purty pictures. I'm using a series of layers, with the first layer being the background made up of 64x64 terrain tiles, then layers of various objects, sprites, senery and so forth.

My problem is that I've run into an impasse as to how I can store a tile arrangement (a.k.a: "map"). I experimented with xml for a bit, but frankly its a huge pain in the ass, massively over kill for this app, and other reasons why I'm not using it. But I can't for the life of me think of another way I could store this data so It would be easily portable.

My current thinking runs along the lines of having a folder full of images, then just some how identifying each image in my map file, solely by some name, so I could keep the complexity of the map file down. But I'm really not sure even how I could implement that. So um, anyone have any suggestions?

Update: Most of my actual code for this is written in C++, utilizing openGL, so far. I have vauge plans to include a perl interpreter later, but I felt justified in asking here because I thought it was a very language non-specific question, dealing more with algorithms. The only reason I post this update is to help people not having to guess at how exactly I implemented it. (Of course, any C++ specific advice would be highly appreciated =] )

update (broquaint): marked off-topic

In reply to OT: Tile maps by BUU

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