Tiled - Good or bad?

[JayRay]

oh no, what I meant was... if you're already doing one layer of a parallax... say, a 43x43 map, it's around 1.28 megs for the layer...

Now, when adding the other layers, like ground addons and such, you're not really adding an entire layer on top of it, just bits and pieces over a transparent PNG layer, which may add 30 or 40 K to the whole map, if strategically designed... The fog layers CAN be setup as JPG and have opacity governed in game, and if the JPG is indexed to a lower file count by color, you're looking at .08 Megs... Light as well, can be a 8-16 color JPG, and also would be around 0.08Megs

1.28 Megs vs 1.5 Megs, not that big of a difference.

Now, granted, devoting 300 megs to graphics would definitely load down the system, but not each map, as its loaded, due to each map still only at the maximum loading and scrolling that 2 meg map. If file size scares you however, there IS a solution....

I found a few scripts that allow you to declare a picture underneath the map at a certain position, and that these pictures would scroll with the maps. This way you can "tile your maps, not bound by the 32x32 pixel environment of RMXP, but by say a 256x256 environment, placing each picture where you need it to go, much like pre-cut rooms from tapletop gaming tilebooks. Then you would also create the tile, cutout the areas that people would appear behind, and lay that layer over the top of the map for a parallaxing map...

file sizes don't bother me quite as much, but I can see how they would be a factor for game lag in some cases.