[TI-ASM] Looking for a tilemap (smoothscrolling)

leofox · Post by **leofox** » Mon 01 Jan, 2007 11:59 am

I'm trying to make gravlab work with tilemaps too, so that i'm not restricted to the screen size for games. However, my smoothscrolling tilemap from desrealm will not work with it.. The kind of tilemap I'm looking for has to be able to output from any pixel position, like I call the tilemap with certain coordinates as input, and it'll draw the image from there. (as opposed to just scroll to a side). I hope you understand what i mean..

I could make this myself, but if one of you guys already made something similar I would consider it a waste of time (why invent the wheel twice aye?). Also, I really suck at that sort of thing, so it would most likely take ages, and be way too slow and ram consuming.

I really hope you can help me..

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Mon 01 Jan, 2007 12:02 pm

Umm have you tried MiSStER tilemap routine which is on ticalc.org it does very smooth scrolling

threefingeredguy · Post by **threefingeredguy** » Mon 01 Jan, 2007 12:44 pm

There's many libraries available to you, from Crashman's to Jim's. Why don't you just roll some dice and pick the one it lands on?

Liazon · Post by **Liazon** » Mon 01 Jan, 2007 2:06 pm

threefingeredguy wrote:There's many libraries available to you, from Crashman's to Jim's. Why don't you just roll some dice and pick the one it lands on?

lol ya i agree.

leofox · Post by **leofox** » Mon 01 Jan, 2007 6:03 pm

The misster tilemap looks good.

Liazon · Post by **Liazon** » Mon 01 Jan, 2007 9:38 pm

anyone got stats yet comparing them all?

It'd be nice to see a size and t-state comparison for all of them. Definitely Jim e's, Dwedit's, Crash's, and misster

leofox · Post by **leofox** » Tue 02 Jan, 2007 11:44 am

I'm using Misster's tilemap now, it works exactly like i'd want it to, and it's definitely fast enough.

Post by **Dwedit** » Tue 02 Jan, 2007 11:40 pm

Crashman's is by far the fastest, but it is the least developer friendly one out there.
* Ridiculously fast!
* You must use a VERTICAL graphmem layout, not compatible with romcalls or existing sprite routines
* You must use vertical tilemaps, not so much a big deal, since you can easily rotate them
* It needs XX00 aligned memory for the tile graphics and graphmem.
* 32 Tiles max, since tile numbers are multiplied by 8 before being added to the map. (this saves the routine from having to do that multiplication)
* Heavily unrolled, it's optimized for speed and not size.
* Routine is less flexible about the size of the tilemap, it must be defined at compile time. You can still set rows or columns of a tilemap as the player moves around, just like on a nes

Now, I know how to fulfill those requirements to use the routine, and could help anyone out who wants to use that one.

I'll guess that crashman's is at least twice as fast as misster's routine, since it takes misster's routine 23 instructions to set up drawing a tile, while crashman's takes 2 instructions, the tile rendering inner loop is also 101 tstates, vs 55 for crashman's. But that speed didn't come from nowhere.

DigiTan · Post by **DigiTan** » Wed 03 Jan, 2007 7:18 pm

I

that. It's also worth addign it comes in size-optimized and speed-optimized flavors to suit your eyecandy demands. If you need more than 32x32 dimensions or more than 32 tiles, I'd go with the Jim e mapper. I haven't used it yet, but it got its share of praises in the Sonic thread. Something for everybody.

Liazon · Post by **Liazon** » Wed 03 Jan, 2007 9:05 pm

But I assume that between Dwedit's, Jim e's, and Misster, they're about in the same ball park?

Post by **Dwedit** » Thu 04 Jan, 2007 1:20 am

The easy way to test is to have it scroll an entire screen completely left and right 10 times, then time how long it took.

Jim e · Post by **Jim e** » Thu 04 Jan, 2007 1:31 am

The fun way would be to set up an interrupt to count the frame rate.

Post by **Dwedit** » Thu 04 Jan, 2007 2:04 am

The tilemap routines often use the shadow registers, so they need interrupts disabled.

Jim e · Post by **Jim e** » Thu 04 Jan, 2007 2:09 am

Dwedit wrote:The tilemap routines often use the shadow registers, so they need interrupts disabled.

Theres always the fall back of the stack of course.

Post by **tr1p1ea** » Thu 04 Jan, 2007 4:11 am

Liazon, Im afraid MiSSTeR probably wont be anywhere close to the speed of Jim e's or Dwedit's. I also have a tilemapper i was working on a little while ago, it isnt quite finished yet, it needs to be optimised more ... and it might not be suited to everyone.