Huge tilemap game

Hi all,

just wondering about the limitations or any experienced tips when it comes to using the tilemap object.

I'm wondering how well the tilemap object would handle a game on a really large scale.. for example 1000x1000 at 64px x 64px per tile.

Also how would it do for say 10,000x10,000?

I'm also assuming culling already takes place for tilemap in the engine, can someone confirm this?

Appreciate any helpful info.

Thanks, Jam.

The size of the layout is irrelevant. All that matters is the size of the tilemap texture, and the amount of things, or objects doing something.

How so, can you explain more about the costs. I'd assume most of my objects would be overlayed on top of the tilemap as it would mostly act as the background/walls

The tilemap is setup as one texture, so there is no extra overhead for a large layout, unless you have a bunch of things going on all the time, changing tiles like an animation, collisions with solid, etc.

The limit is the size of the texture, just like all the other objects. The tilemap is essentially one object with one texture.

I see so the limitation comes down to the GPU or memory somewhere? I.e. making a huge tilemap results in a huge texture.

If the tilemap is a texture, i guess it isn't culled then?

No. The tilemap is one texture sliced into tiles and rendered as one object so it uses no more ram than the initial tilemap texture.

Tilemaps are generally a ram saving measure.

Yes there are "culling" features for on screen rendering, as well as collisions.

Each tilemap tile can be considered equivalent to a cheaper version of a sprite, but whereas each sprite has it's own texture a tile shares it's texture with all tiles of the same type. Greatly reducing the required VRAM and number of texture swaps required to render your scene.

I sometimes wonder if you can over do it with tilemaps...

I have, off the top of my head, 5 tiles maps on any one level and they each cover the full layout and exist on separate layers. I use them for things like fore/background graphics, fake walls, lighting effects and (static) liquid bodies.

Probably no more efficient way to do those things that using a tilemap though, I guess.

Thanks guys I appreciate the info!