Question

I’m trying to develop a scrollable tile map in Cocos2D which uses an UIPanGestureRecognizer to do the dirty work, but while developing it, stumbled upon some problems for which I would like to ask for an advice.

The basic scrolling management works fine, it’s precise and accurate and works by adding the translation recognized by the pan gesture manager to the tiles of the map. The problem is that the map is large and I just draw a small viewport of it, while I want to manage it like it’s scrollable without any problem.

What I was thinking about is that, as soon as a whole row or column get out of the visible screen, it is moved to the opposite side, the corresponding texture rects are updated (I’m working entirely with a CCSpriteBatchNode), so that it will continuously update the viewport to make the whole thing work. This seems fine but I’ve found many problems in dealing with when to move the row/column, how to keep track of this issue (eg when pan changes direction from forth to back) and many little details which make me think that I should find a better approach.

Is there a common solution to my problem? That is: managing a scrollable viewport of a tilemap which should move over the whole map so the to the end user it seems like as if the map is infinite.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I solved my issue by developing a viewport in which rows and columns are effectively moved from left side to right side and from top side to bottom side.

This is done automatically when a new column or row enters the viewport and it’s made by expanding the drawn viewport over the real one by an amount which is enough to avoid any graphical issue to the user.