   Packing maps into one file?
  Hello,I am working on building a 2d tile based platform game, and have just been wondering about how to store/distribute the games levels.My game allows you to load a 'World' which is made up of potentially up to 10000 map files (A 100x100 grid, though most of the time this grid won't be filled). The map files are just more grids of tiles.Anyways, I't seems like having up to 10000 small files in a folder seems like a inefficient way to do this. I have searched around a bit, but have been unable to find anything extremely helpful.I figure that the best thing to do would be to compile all the maps into one world file, and just load that file into memory. I have thought about just creating one xml file to store everything, but I'm not too sure about it.If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be grateful!(oh, and a bonus would be the ability to put the tile sets into the file as well, but this is not too big of a issue)   
  Use something like PhysFS or zZipLib, that way you can compress all your files as a zip file and access its contents directly from the game as you would with simple files.;  Thanks, though, I can't seem to figure out how to set up or use either of those.I don't suppose anyone could help me out installing physfs? I am using CodeBlocks on Windows XP.[Edited by - Coal on May 15, 2009 7:33:32 PM];  write your own :)a little header format with file names, and their offset within the file. then each file serialised as binary. easy! :)or you could look at the .pak file stuff iD have.   ;  GameDev.net resource section has few tutorials on writing a custom archive/pak file format. Resource Files Explained.   ;Quote:Original post by CoalThanks, though, I can't seem to figure out how to set up or use either of those.I don't suppose anyone could help me out installing physfs? I am using CodeBlocks on Windows XP.You'd have to compile the library from source yourself, I think all it takes is running CMake to get the project files or makefiles, build it and then either copy over the headers and libraries or add the proper compilation and linking flags to your project so GCC can find libphysfs.a and physfs.h.