Hello, Arma here!

I was wondering, how are the maps of Raiden II made? (Like these:)

Are these maps really tile-based? Or is it one huge image that just render according to the camera?

It would be really fun to know how these maps are created, because I am trying to make a game along these lines, and I can't really see if tile-based maps are the way to go or not.

I would love to hear if someone has any ideas!

- Arma

You can tell they are tiled. Look at the water with the foam middle left, or the tree at bottom and on right hand side.

You can tell they are tiled. Look at the water with the foam middle left, or the tree at bottom and on right hand side.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's tiled, just that the images might be used over and over. There are other ways to make maps. For example, gleed2d creates non-tiled maps, and could be used by something like Raiden.

However, there's a very good chance it is tile based.

Raiden 2, an arcade console game from 1993, probably is not doing that.

It was the era of tiled layered sprites. The ROM size of the original PCB version appears to be around 200KB.

Are these maps really tile-based? Or is it one huge image that just render according to the camera?

Considering the era and the game, maps would certainly be tile based.

The ground continuously scrolls top to bottom, and moves left to right based on the player's position. That works really well for tiles, especially on that era where tile drawing was automatically handled in hardware. It is unlikely they had a giant level-long image of the ground and still managed to fit inside 200KB. It is far easier to point the hardware at a ROM segment, then pass it 8-byte, 12-byte, or 16-byte reference numbers.

I'm sure many of the tiles were made by breaking up large artwork. An artist may have drawn a tree and then used a tool to build a 2x3 block of sprite indexes. Most of the map segments, things like roads and coastlines and water and grass and fields and building tops, were likely all built from tiles and composed by hand in tools.

Look at the images and you'll note there are only two or three different angle for most of things. Many of the tile engines of the day included a pair of flip bits, flip horizontal and flip vertical, and many included rotate bits, rotate 1/4 turn 0-3 times. The four bits allowed a single sprite to potentially have 16 different variants. Most of the ground tiles on the game appear to be rotated and flipped in many different layouts.

The game has been ported to many different systems. I don't see the images on Google, but I imagine a few of those ports have image sheets that contain all the image tiles and sprites.

There's little reason for you to go tile based though, unless you really like using tile editors.

Otherwise I would probably generate the map in something like Photoshop and slice it into power of two sized chunks (maybe 1024x1024) then load/unload those on the fly (ridiculously simple solution: store the sequental image file names in an array, can even be fixed size, async load 2-3 tiles in advance into the resource cache, unload one tile behind. Should only take maybe 14mb of memory for loaded chunks).

Tons more freedom and easier content creation. You can still make it look retro too, if that what you're after.

Hey, thanks everybody!

Yeah, my aim is to go for a retro feel and look.

I was just wondering, because tiling all these maps in an editor would take some time, so I leaned more towards the idea of only rendering the part of one huge image (the part the camera can see).

Again, thank you everybody!

But creating that one huge image might take longer than using a decent tile editor!
Unless you're using a scrolling photo of course.
BTW if you can get a MAME version of this or a similar game, then doesn't pressing a function key bring up the graphics pages? I can't remember which, it's been a while since I fired it up?

I wanto play it! bet it cost €100,- again or something

I wanto play it! bet it cost €100,- again or something

Nah, find YT video of someone playing it and use that video to make your own variant of it. Costs absolutely nothing to do that and it isn't illegal. The plus side is that you get programming experience, possibly learn something new that you may not know, and get a finished game to add to your portfolio.

I wanto play it! bet it cost €100,- again or something

I couldn't find Raiden II specifically but GoG has Raiden Legacy which apparently contains a few Raidens of that era.