Is there an ideal tile size? I am working on a top down strategy game and I was starting to make 40x40 tiles for the tilemap. I saw the following advice
"A tile size that’s a power of 2 is handy when authoring your art; its easy divisibility means you’ll be able to create a number of repeating patterns."
I was later reading in some game engines that they technically will perform better with power of 2 tiles.
I have not gotten too far so I could change to 32x32 tiles, but 40 x 40 seems to very cleanly fit the 400x240.
Does anyone know if on the playdate there is any technical reason it would perform better with 32x32 tiles?
Does anyone have any reason why 40 x 40 would be cumbersome to use?
Looking for any advice as although I have a technical background I am very new at trying game development.
I'd be pretty surprised if there were any noticeable difference. Image storage used to be 32-bit aligned, so going from 32 to 40 pixels would actually double the storage requirement--which on its own isn't a big deal (1-bit images are really small!) but that could possibly cause enough additional cache stalls to make a difference. But we changed that to 8-bit alignment a while back..
If your tiles are aligned to the screen--i.e., you're always drawing the 32x32 tiles at 32-bit aligned x coordinates--then I expect drawing will be a tad faster than 40x40. I think you'd have to be doing a lot of drawing before running up against the 50 fps display refresh limit.
Thank you for your knowledge about the internals.I don't anticipate intense graphics timing requirements as the game is going to be turn based, but still no need to do things that would intentionally be slower. Also, from other IT experience I am thinking that it may be best to avoid doing anything "non-standard" unless there is a good reason.
I will play around a bit with both before I start creating lots of tiles.
Thank you again
I appreciate any real world advice anyone has on tile size anyone has.
I personally use 40x40, found no issues with it. My personal opinion is always go as large as possible with tile sizes. If you go too large the player might get annoyed with how much of the level is offscreen, go too small and the graphical clarity starts to suffer. 40x40 to me is a happy medium, you can get quite detailed gfx at that size but still have 10 x 6 tiles on screen at any given time.