side scroller question

I am trying to write simple side scroller. Within each level of the game,
there will be platforms of different height that the character can walk on
and there will be various obstacles that the character will have to jump
over. My question is, what is typically the best way to handle those kind of
things. Do I just store the coordinates of all the level intricacies and
check those coordinates against the current position of the character each
frame and then adjust the path of the characters motion based on that? Help
appreciated, thanks.

In article <AaQ0e.7700$PC1.1624@fe06.lga>,
Andy White <brighamandrew@msn.com> wrote:
>I am trying to write simple side scroller. Within each level of the
>game, there will be platforms of different height that the character
>can walk on and there will be various obstacles that the character
>will have to jump over. My question is, what is typically the best
>way to handle those kind of things. Do I just store the coordinates
>of all the level intricacies and check those coordinates against the
>current position of the character each frame and then adjust the
>path of the characters motion based on that? Help appreciated,
>thanks.

The traditional method of dealing with this problem is to split the
map up into 'tiles', which are 8x8 or 16x16 pixels in size. Each tile
has some basic information about its collision type, e.g. "can jump up
through, but can't fall down thru." That way, you only need to check
the character's motion against a limited number of tiles.

This also lets you make a map editor relatively quickly-- you have
a set of tiles that you can then 'paint' onto a map.

Nathan Mates

--
<*> Nathan Mates - personal webpage http://www.visi.com/~nathan/
# Programmer at Pandemic Studios -- http://www.pandemicstudios.com/
# NOT speaking for Pandemic Studios. "Care not what the neighbors
# think. What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?" -R.A. Heinlein