I decided to make a 2d game in Java (using the slick2d library and MarteEngine) and I attempted to do it without a tiled map. It seems like my upcoming tasks are going to be very difficult without having a tiled map. Those tasks are pathing and collisions (between buildings and players/NPCs).
Is it going to be nearly impossible to easily implement a pathfinding and collisions system? I suppose I could always manually create a grid in the game but that might become kinda messy considering I’d have to move it since I have a functional camera.
Also, by collisions I mean units walking into each other and becoming a single unit. I guess that could be categorized under pathing but I have no solution to fixing them from overlapping.
Any ideas are appreciated!
A lot of games still divide the map into tiles even if it isn’t a tile-based game.
The reason is that you can do collision detection by checking whether an object is overlapping any of the objects in its current tile or any of the neighbouring tiles. As long as your objects are no larger than the tiles, this collision detection scheme is guaranteed to work out all possible collisions.
EDIT
If you have exisiting graphics that are not tile-based, it is still worth using this kind of “virtual” grid for collision detection etc. You can mark specific grid squares as being wholly or partially “blocked” if you want to detect collisions with map features and suchlike.