Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24854750-20140529202926

Not quite sure if this is the appropriate place in the forum to post something like this, but a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to undertake a huge project, something to test my patience, critical thinking, and brainstorming skills. So I decided I wanted to create a map. A big map. A MIND-BOGGLING HUGE MAP!! I noted that the BG tiles could create a 64x64 map before it starts to overlap itself, but I wanted something much larger. Why? That's part of the reason for this post.

So after weeks of struggling with my limited knowledge of Petit Computer and coding in general, I finally have two different working versions. One, the first that I made, is fully randomized. The bottom screen is used as a full map, each pixel representing a different type of terrain. When touched, the game teleports you to that pixel and generates a 64x64 map based not only on the color of the pixel you touched, but also of the pixels immediately surrounding the one touched. You can't walk outside of the 64x64 area, which was a huge downside to this approach. So, the second contains a lot of the same random terrain generation of the first, but with a lot more control to allow for specific placement of certain tiles (particularly in regards to water and shorelines). I thought what was particularly clever about this approach is that I created an area the size of 320x320 (which includes over 100,000 BG tiles), yet it only took up about 100 lines of the code. The downside, which I'm sure some of you have guessed by now, is that the above 320x320 example takes over 3 minutes to load....

As for the discussion part of this post, I wondered if anybody had attempted to create large overworld maps and how they went about it, and also if anybody had any ideas as to what I might use my map for. 