Personally, I think that type of engine is a pure piece of SHIT! The game Buldar Gate comes with like 4-5 cdz to hold the bitmaps!
Who in the hell wants to play a game like that? Games like Diablo have the same graphics quality and are alot smaller.

I think collision detection in that type of engine is pretty much done, by mapping out coords, in a map editor. Like you would select patches of the map that are blocked, and then the game engine detects if you are in the coords, and if you are, then it's blocked. Pretty simple.

Sorry if I was a little coarse.
hehehehe

But it's your choice, if you want to use that engine.

Later,

email - datisme@notme.com

Da_KiD

Sorry, but what is "Big Bitmap Engine"?
Isn't Baldurs's Gate were made of isometric
tiles? IMO, it has quite a nice detail...
but now I think AOK has the better map
engine! That should be the iso-tiled map
right?

He's talking about pre-rendered 3D backgrounds that take up the entire
screen.

Why is everyone in the world so radical about everything? Everything is always a fucking tradeoff!

The big bitmap instead of iso tiled maps trades space (lots of it) for speed (a little here and there, but sometimes counterred by memory restrictions) and the possibility of non-repeating backgrounds. Mind you, Baldur's Gate had lots of repeating objects that negated the main advantage of using a big bitmap. However, if well implemented and used to it's fullest, allows for great flexibility and graphics quality.

- Splat

While Baldur's Gate was an ok game I do think the static background piece is a little overated. IMHO, I doesn't lend itself to interactivity and you feel like you a walking on a picture and not a world. I certainly would be a lot easier to program, HOWEVER I feel sorry for you're artists because for them, its a ton of work....

Personally I think Diablo I (and what I've seen from II) shows that you can have a beautiful env with tiles and resuable objects.

Is a big bitmap engine or whatever an engine where they draw a backgournd thats really big and then you can move around on predfined paths along the map and when you move to the edge of the map and keep going it blits in pixels so from the rest of the map so as you move along or something? If not what the heck is it?
thanx
P.S. sorry for sounding like an idiot

Baldurs Gate's big bitmap engine works by storing a large surface in memory and blitting off of it as the player moves. Portions of the image cache are loaded from disk/storage as needed. Its actually one of the simpler engines to program because you take away to the need to think in tiles or polygons as far as drawing you're screen goes. The worst task is simply going to be managing you're loads of data into the image cache as the player moves so that the smooth scrolling effect is maintained. There is nothing rocket science about it.

Where the player can walk is determined by what I've always called a walk map and this is where some of the low points of a big bitmap engine comes in. A walk map is established for you're large image. Its basically a 2d array respresenting xy space on you're screen. A specific entry in the array coresponds to a location on you're image and contains a value that tells you you're walking constraints. For you're player to move you query the location in the walk map that he is going towards and then as he is "walking" shift the large image however many pixels one location represents in you're engine.

The problem is that since big bitmap engines are feeding basically, as far you're drawing code is concerned, nothing but a bunch of random pixels, there is no way to dynamically create you're walk maps. You would have to hand fashion them for each large image and you will find that such activity is boring, tedious, and prone to error. I thought I had read about Bioware having 2 full time poeple entering in data for their walkmaps and other stuff in the constuction of Baldur's Gate. Not my idea of fun!

Comparitively, using something tile based you can attach states to specific tiles and dynamically determine things like a walk map. In the end big bitmap Baldur's Gate like engines are easy to do but because every piece of location information has to be done by hand, you soon discover that making dynamic, really interactive environments becomes a real chore, especially as you expand the game world even a little. Not to mention, as I said above, you seriously cut down on the ability to reuse artwork. That said, unless you have people dying to do data entry and art for you, go for tile based or 3d. You'll find it much more rewarding anyway :-).

Someone can tell me where can I get more information about big bitmaps engines like the Baldur's Gate engine ?
How collision is detected in this kind of engine ?

Gustavo Muller

Tell me if this makes sense:

quote:
as far as drawing you are screen goes. The worst task is simply going to be managing you are loads of data into the image cache

you're = you are
your = posession, "his, hers, mine, yours"

Sorry, that was irritating me quite a lot.