Okay, been thinking about it a little more.. here''s a thought.. it seems like you want to avoid blitting the entire thing over again each iteration, which probably involves some calculations to determine what tiles go where, where the player should be blit, etc. Here''s some thoughts on how you could reduce the amount of "thinking" your render loop has to do while the player is idling:

1) When the engine starts, calculate where all the tiles need to be, and blit it as a whole to an off-screen surface. Then, at each iteration, if nothing has changed, merely blit that surface onto the back buffer before you blit the player (you should always blit the player sprite at each iteration). Then, when the player moves, determine what has been affected by his move, and reblit only the affected area. You may have to reblit the entire viewport if he scrolled the map, etc.

2) That''s another optimization.. instead of blitting the entire map, make sure you are only blitting what the player can see. That''s called the map''s "viewport". When the map scrolls, recalculate the visible tiles to get the new viewport.

Well I''m just ranting now.. hope some of this helps..

-Marc
-SiliconReality Software
-http://www.blackenfall.org

Victory!!!
Boy, I think I half-did it. I had to remove the trees(too bad), but I got a little bit of optimisation running. The good thing is that the "dirty" tiles are "cleaned". The bad thing is that there are some places in which they remain dirty.
I''ll work on it, and after it is done, I''ll post a demo.
There is already a downloadable demo, at Caesar Studios but it''s pretty old and it''s not isometric(there).

Wish me luck guys!!!

Complete victory!!!
I have solved the problem. The most expected download is available. A direct link is here. If I wrote something wrong and it doesn''t work go to http://www.caesar-studios.go.ro.
Watch and cry!!!

I think I said VB was good for prototyping, but it is also great if you need to develop games very quickly, or if you need to learn something. And I do believe it''s possible to make games that compete with any C++ games. I won''t prove it yet though. DirectX, I couldn''t get your download link to work.

F*****G site!
Good damn it, Romanian sites.
Until I find a good site, I can''t provide a demo. Can anyone direct me to a good free web host site?

Hey all, The Scrolling Game Development Kit was written mostly in VB. It''s available in the GameDev Showcase and also at http://gamedev.sourceforge.net/. Also it''s all open source.

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Original post by DirectX

F*****G site!
Good damn it, Romanian sites.
Until I find a good site, I can''t provide a demo. Can anyone direct me to a good free web host site?

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Hypermart.