Tile-based video game

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Ultima VI

A tile-based video game, or grid-based video game, is a type of

top-down, side view, or 2.5D view of the playing area, and are almost always two-dimensional
.

Much video game hardware from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s has native support for displaying tiled screens with little interaction from the CPU.

Overview

Tile-based games are not a distinct

game, but all three render the world as tiles. Ultima III and Civilization draw the tiles via software, while the maze in the original arcade version of Pac-Man is made of tiles displayed by the game's graphics hardware. Tiles allow developers to build with a set of reusable components instead of drawing everything individually.

Tile-based video games usually use a

.

Variations include level data using "material tiles" that are procedurally transformed into the final tile graphics, and groupings of tiles as larger-scale "supertiles" or "chunks," allowing large tiled worlds to be constructed under heavy memory constraints.

Ultima 7
uses a "tile," "chunk" and "superchunk" three-layer system to construct an enormous, detailed world within the PCs of the early 1990s.

History

The tile-map model was introduced to video games by

video game cartridges
as small as 4K in size.

Atari 400/800 home computers, released in 1979, allow the standard character set to be replaced by a custom one.[2][3]
The new characters don't have to be glyphs, but the walls of a maze or ladders or any game graphics that fit in an 8x8 pixel square. The video coprocessor provides different modes for displaying character grids. In most modes, individual monochrome characters can be displayed in one of four colors; others allow characters to be constructed of 2-bit pixels instead, which allowed up to 5 colors to be displayed by swapping between 2 colors via an extra bit in the tile index byte. Atari used the term redefined characters and not tiles.

The tile model became widely used in specific game genres such as

Mega Drive
) being prime examples of tile-based games, producing a highly recognizable look and feel.

Blades of Exile
features multi-character combat on a tiled overhead map

Most early tile-based games used a top-down perspective.[

dimetric perspectives began to predominate in tile-based games, using parallelogram
-shaped tiles instead of square tiles. Notable titles include:

  • Ultima Online, which mixed elements of 3D (the ground, which is a tile-based height map) and 2D (objects) tiles
  • Civilization II, which updated Civilization's top-down perspective to a dimetric perspective
  • The
    Avernum series, which remade the top-down role-playing series Exile
    with an isometric engine.

Hexagonal tile-based games have been limited for the most part to the strategy and

Battle for Wesnoth
.

See also

References

  1. . Retrieved 8 July 2016.
  2. ^ "De Re Atari". atariarchives.org. Atari, Inc. 1982.
  3. ^ Patchett, Craig (1982). Designing Your Own Character Sets. COMPUTE! Books.