im working on the loading/saving of maps for my 2d tile game and so far ive managed to get it working but the filesize for the map is around 70+ mb!
its a 5000x5000 tile map (all towns/levels/dungeons/etc are stored on 1 layer), i have 3 bytes per tile (texture1, texture2, flags (blocked?, water?, and texture blend flags)).
in the loading routine i calculate the coordinates for the tiles based on the position in the file, so thats another 3 floats (4 bytes per?) and then theres texture coordinates.. etc
this all adds up to around 600 mb for me, and thats just for the loading of the map.
does anybody know any better methods? i was thinking of adding compression but that would be the same thing, decompress and load the (large) file.