   a Little Request
  Ive been pushed and pulled in both ways SDL Is too slow for Tiling a map at 800 x 600 people say, people tell me to use SDL with OPENGL, peopl3 tell me to use direct x, its all getting way our of hand for me, so i was wanting to know....what do you guys think, just a basic tile engine, and if you could suply me with a working tile code for SDL only ide love it, or anyof them. lol thanks guys   
  What compiler and platforms are you planning on developing for/with?If it's windows(or certain consoles) only directx will work just fine.  If not, OpenGL with SDL is a nice method because you can get standard code to run on almost any machine under the sun.  I'm personally using OpenGL with SDL for a 2d sidescrolling engine I've just started developing and I've been finding the two work well together.I'd suggest doing some google searches for SDL/OpenGL tutorials.  NeHe is popular (though he doesn't work with sdl), cone3d is on this site as well and has some tutorials on how to set the two up.I can't speak much about directx.I can support you with setup code for SDL/OpenGL if you like, but I'm not home for another 3 hours.  I've got the project files and such, I'll bundle them up and upload.  I'll also include the texture loading code if you like. (SDL works very nicely with OpenGL to load them... I've only got bitmaps right now, but it's easy to work with PNGs or anything else with SDL's image libs)   ;  Unless you have things happening on every tile all the time there should really be no reason to be UPDATEING over 10-20 tiles at a time, You draw all the tiles initially then redraw the ones that have activity or when you scroll the screen (because all the tiles change possition). I was able to make a TBS game that used tile maps in SDL and this worked quite well. However if you would rather not deal with the hastle of making sure that every active tile is draw (and looking back it was alot of trouble) then I suggest using any 3d engine because the drawing techniques are much more efficient. Making a tile engine isn't too tough, all you need is a way to loop through all the tiles and draw them, other things can be added latter such as not drawing ones you cant see but thats the basic idea. I deffinetly think that either OGL or DX will meet your needs though.   ;  im developing for windows, but im not advanced enough for this 3d stuff. all these matrices and stuff is was too complicated. im only in 10th grade so i havnt even begun to scratch the surface of this shit.. lol   ;  Well, if you don't want to use OpenGL or DirectX at all then you'll be using SDL, old outdated dos graphics, or another language.  Some example pseudocode of setting up one tile:<example>GLuint texture;loadTexture("texture.bmp", &texture); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture); //select the textureglBegin(GL_QUADS); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(100, 100,  0);// Bottom Left Of The Texture and Quad glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(200, 100,  0);// Bottom Right Of The Texture and Quad glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(200, 0,  0);// Top Right Of The Texture and Quad glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(100,  0,  0);// Top Left Of The Texture and QuadglEnd();</example>It's not -exactly- like that, I have a texture manager that uses handles and such to keep track of textures based on a string name, but it's the general idea.I can understand if this is a bit beyond your experience.  You may want to look at doing a different project if you're not comfortable with this.  One nice thing about OpenGL or DirectX is that scrolling is pretty much not an issue.  You just move a camera around as opposed to having to manage each item yourself and move them all manually based on a global position.You will notice in my example code there are no matrixes or scary stuff like that.  OpenGL actually supports an explicite 2d mode based on pixel coordinates which is what I've initialized mine to.  You just ignore the Z value (set it to 0, though you can set it to anything you like with perspective projections turned off and it will simply modify draw order which is great because you get free layers too).   ;  willthiswork89: I've sent you a PM offering to email you source code to a layered tile engine I wrote about six months ago.   ;  the code I was going to send you is not a tiling engine (as you want one), it just has a texture manager and sets up opengl and sdl so you might want to go with nilkn. (I'd strip out the portions I'd send to you from my current code simply because a lot of the stuff I'm doing does not translate well to a tile based game.)What's your tiling engine made with, I'm curious.   ;Quote:Original post by M2tMWhat's your tiling engine made with, I'm curious.The rendering portion is directly dependent on ClanLib (I didn't take the time to abstract this dependency away). I chose ClanLib because it was a strictly 2D project for which I did not need any special effects or the like, and I admittedly was not at the time very well-versed with OpenGL or Direct3D. Most persuasive in my choice, however, was simply that I was not interested in dealing with the low-level things such as loading textures, displaying sprites and animations, etc.   ;  well as long as im not messing with insane geometry and stuff ide be willing to try, ide probably go with the SDL with OpenGL, anyone got anytutorials? reason is because i dont like windows programming, nothing makes sense in it, same goes for direct x lol.so if you have some good tutorials specifically for sdl and open gl just message me or reply here. thanks!   ;  i tried finding some tutorials but no luck..   