Large large platformer, how to handle spritesheet

brainydexter · 01-30-2009, 03:02 AM

I am making this game with a bunch of people in which they intend to make it a side-scrolling platformer game. The idea that we intend to make has a different background in each "screen" along with a different tileset.
So, what would be best way to approach this problem in terms of drawing the assets and scrolling it ?
We have artists who are going to draw the whole "5" screens. But, somehow, I want to find a really good way to handle this, since even if I store the whole image as a spritesheet, it would be (1024 * 768) * 5 screens. This would be a huge ..huge image ! I am not even sure if XNA will be able to load that much.

I would really appreciate any help / link that can possibly help me with this..

dzeligman · 01-30-2009, 07:33 AM

XNA can load that, 5 isn't that bad.

To be honest, in Fusion, I scroll 3 large jpegs. If I had more time I would have divided them each into a spritesheet and render each tile individually.

You're going to need support a "tile engine" of sorts that has multiple layers.
Nick Gravelyn did some tutorials a while back for XNA you can check out :
http://www.nickontech.com/archive/