2d non tile based

Does anyone have any experience with a non-tile based map in a 2d game?

Kind of like Liero (which can be found at www.dosgames.com).

Some friends and I are making a game like Liero, and we have some ideas on how to do the map, but we have always done tile based maps before, and any input on how to do a 2d non-tile based map would be helpful.

i don't have much exp in such a thing but have you tried flipcode? they have a lot of tuts on obscure stuff...though i don't know if they have what your looking for...

http://www.flipcode.com

well with the dirt you could do one of two things: 1 have it tile based but made to look like its not, or two have the dirt be a bunch of randomly ploted pixles all of dirt like colors. The rocks could be bitmaps that are blited randomly onto the srean or be placed at predetermined cordinates.

Do layers, have a background texture, and a level texture (or whatever system you come up with).

You just need to be able to do a check on the players destination to see what color value it contains, if its anything other than black(or whatever you have for clear), then you dont let them move there.


More of an explination will give better examples :)

Make everything vertex-based ( I don't know whether this is the correct expression, read what follows).

Treat everything as if you're creating a 3D game (e.g Quake) but ignore the Y axis (or Z, depends on your coordinate system). Make a 2D vertex editor (or just use some free Modeller like Blender) that you use to make maps, and then do texture mapping is done in any 3D game (texture mapping is applied to transformed polygons, i.e 2D polygons). For collision detection tests, you can use 2D versions of the original 3D ones :
AABB tests : AABR (Axis aligned bounding rectangles)
OBB tests : OBR
Sphere tests : Circle
Plane tests : Line tests
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