Basically I'm doing a 3D RPG. Not, like, actual 3D rendering and crap. Think Wizardry.
Anyway, basically, my main idea is to have four "bands" of depth in the dungeon view. These would basically just lie on top of eachother. Each band is basically showing whatever's on the map up to four "spaces" away from the player.
Anyway, so I basically need to figure out how to do a map engine or something. The most direct method, of course, would just be to define some sort of room class and link them all together with pointers. The problem with this is that I'd need to recompile every time I made a new map. That'd and it'd take for-freaking-ever to do.
Basically, I'm guessing I'll need to store the map data in a text file. The map in the text would be made out of ascii, and each letter/character/number I use would represent some specific layout; 1 could be a normal straight hallway, 2 would mark a door on the left side, 3 would mark just the hallway turning left, etc. That wouldn't be too terrible to do.
I assumed I'd then read it into a matrix or something, and then... update the player's x/y coords and compare this against the matrix.
My main issue here is that I'm not sure exactly how to associate the images I'd be using with the data on the map. Would I need to map one of the symbols I meantioned earlier to... a specific surface using a map?
