How to generate a random topdown RPG level (with tiles)

I am planning a top down RPG with random landscapes and random towns... (I know, I know) :D
My biggest fear is performance. Because I have 64*64 tiles and need to place about 1000 of them.

Question 1 - What Object should I chose for tiles.
Active object with different Directions for different tiles? Paste the Actives to the background as soon as they show the right tile? Or should I go with backdrops (if even possible) or something else. Performance is key!

Question 2 - Where would you store the information which tile has which graphic displayed?
Should I make an Array? Isn't this a problem with 1000+ tiles? How would you do it?

Question 3 - Making random gras is easy. But how would you do Paths?
Is there a way to calculate with arrays? At the moment, I think I use an active which shoots through the tiles and sometimes slightly changes directions and makes a path with every tile it colides.

Question 4 - How would you do it so the NPCs walk mostly on the path and not on the gras?
How would you do the movement. Ball with bouncing or is there a better way to make NPC walk from A to B through a path?

I just want to hear your ideas and experiences. You don't have to answer every question ;-)

1) definitively what you said is the best choice, shouldn't hurt performance as you are pasting the tiles as backdrops (and destroying the original creator after that).

2) if tiles are static, external files could be a good choice (if possible, depends on your target platform), Actives with different directions/frames are good choices too, anything that let's you relate a graphic to a number will be needed. The Active backdrop object could help you here as well.

I would love to see answers for 3 y 4!

1. Actives

2. Array. x,y,z. X and Y for the position, Z for whatever info you want to store for the tile.

3. This really depends on a lot of things... What type of paths are you talking about? How detailed? Do they serve a purpose other than purely graphical? Etc.

4. Node based movement sounds like the best choice. The paths would have nodes spread along them... you could use one of the pathfinding extensions that handles node based movement for that.

Thanks! Already good answers!

Are there more suggestions?

Follow up questions (especially on Konidias):
1. With actives, do you mean the solution add to backdrop and then destroy the active? Or paste to to background (they disappear when outside of the screen, perhaps I am missing something) Just clarification.
2. Thanks for the suggestion. I forget that there is a Z in Arrays. Is there an easy way to work with arrays and see the values inside it? Sometimes it is a bit overwhelming...
3 + 4. Characters should follow the paths, when they are in "go from House to Store" mode. How would you guys create paths and "Nodes"? Also I cant find the Node Movement and spread Nodes. Also I am kind of limited because of the IOS exporter. But any suggestions welcome!

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Originally Posted by Morbus Crohn

Thanks! Already good answers!

Are there more suggestions?

Follow up questions (especially on Konidias):
1. With actives, do you mean the solution add to backdrop and then destroy the active? Or paste to to background (they disappear when outside of the screen, perhaps I am missing something) Just clarification.
2. Thanks for the suggestion. I forget that there is a Z in Arrays. Is there an easy way to work with arrays and see the values inside it? Sometimes it is a bit overwhelming...
3 + 4. Characters should follow the paths, when they are in "go from House to Store" mode. How would you guys create paths and "Nodes"? Also I cant find the Node Movement and spread Nodes. Also I am kind of limited because of the IOS exporter. But any suggestions welcome!

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Morbus Crohn. I have an open source "Node Example" on my website. maybe you can adapt the coding for your uses.

Marv

1. Could be possible to only create actives that you'll be seeing on screen (and a bit around it for when the camera moves around) This way you'd only be using a couple dozen actives at any given time. Not sure what kind of performance hit that would take though. :P It would be fun to test. I don't think pasting into the background is the way to go in this situation.

2. There isn't an easy way to work with them that I know of... I suppose you could create one in MMF though... :p

3+4. If you're limited with extensions you'll have to make some custom node based movement which isn't too hard once you figure out the basics... Just don't expect to do stuff like pathfinding around moving obstacles and all that. :P The nodes would just be placed at corner points/starting and ending points/intersections. Then you'd place the character at a node and it would be given an end node to go to, and you'd have to code the bit where it figures which nodes between the start and end to move to... then the character would walk from node to node in order, until it reaches it's end point.

The "finding which nodes between the start and end to move to" bit is the tricky part. It would probably deal with figuring the shortest distance by testing the surrounding nodes and finding the least amount of nodes needed to reach the end node. :)

@nivram
Thanks for your example. I already tried it out and I will use something similar in case there is no easier solution.

@Konidias
Thanks. So would you chose to create 1000+ active tiles without pasting it as background object? Or is this just for the solution with the dynamic tiles generator (which sounds not easy ;-) ?
Also your example sounds interesting. But isn't there an easy solution like: only pathway tiles are no obstacle and movement is like in an RTS game where it finds the shortest way from A to B? :-)

Other suggestions, especially in regards of performance?

I'm actually curious about the dynamic tile generation idea... I'll try to make an example of this... Can you give me the dimensions of your game screen so I can use that as a starting point? I'll use 64x64 sized tiles as well. :)

The 1000 actives thing is only a solution with the dynamic tiles idea... I don't think it would work too well to have 1000 64x64 actives sitting around for no reason all the time. :p

As for the path stuff... Well I wasn't sure how you wanted it... If only path tiles would be walkable, then it would be a little easier to do.

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Konidias
1. Could be possible to only create actives that you'll be seeing on screen (and a bit around it for when the camera moves around) This way you'd only be using a couple dozen actives at any given time. Not sure what kind of performance hit that would take though. :P It would be fun to test. I don't think pasting into the background is the way to go in this situation.

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I did something like that quite a while ago.

Heres the file Attachment 7170

I didn't realize what you were doing at first, but that's a very nice method. I was expecting you to be creating and destroying objects as you scrolled, but since the tiles are all the same object it isn't necessary. Cool stuff.

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Originally Posted by Bigfoot

I did something like that quite a while ago.

Heres the file Attachment 7170

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That's awesome... pretty much exactly what I was thinking of. Good example :)

Awesome example! But I am still not sure if I should use this or go for background objects. How performant are 1000+ backdrop tiles?

Also I am still not sure how to make paths only related to an Array which tells me if there is a path or a wall or a grass tile...

You're going to be awfully limited with background objects I would think. The example is exactly what you need.

Not sure what you're asking with the "related to an Array" comment.

I disagree.
If you're using standard or HWA runtimes, 1000 backdrop objects is *nothing* (1024 tiles = 32x32, which is tiny) - it won't affect performance in the slightest.
Using backdrop objects will be much simpler and easier in every way - especially when it comes to handling events offscreen.
I would certainly go with backdrop objects.

@ Konidias
Like MuddyMole said, in my game there are a lot of offscreen events and NPCs doint their thing. If one NPC need to walk from point A to B and its completely offscreen, I am not sure how I should do it at the moment. with backdrops, I can make them an obstacle and have collisions. without I have to rely on the array where the tiles are stored and somehow make a custom array based movement.

Okay then. Now tell me how you're going to randomly generate backdrops. Because you can't create them at runtime and they aren't meant to be objects that you can modify and work with at runtime.

Of course you can create them at runtime. You just store all the tile images as animation frames in an active object, and then use the "add to backdrop" action to create backdrop objects (and if you need to remove them at runtime, there's an action to "delete created backdrops at..." too).

Ah for some reason I was only thinking there was a paste to backdrop option