Using tiles as items to pick up on map

Million Tile Engine
#1

It would be nice to be able to place tiles of objects (like keys, potions or whatever) right on the map in Tiled so you can see where everything is - rather than a bunch of circles as object placeholders.

However, I understand that those tiles do not exist until they appear on the screen (or at least in the culling margin)? So in a single player game, that might be ok (using remove tile once you picked up the item), in multiplayer - could remove tile trigger a communication to the other players that once that tile spot comes on their screen that the item has already been taken?

Or should I just stick with “objects” in Tiled?

Thanks Guys

#2

I should clarify that the display object for the tile does not exist, nor the information supporting the display object, but the tile ID does exist within the map world arrays, no matter where you are in the map. The entirety of the map data is loaded together. Because of this, calling updateTile(input) can alter any ‘tile’ anywhere, onscreen or off, and this update will be persistent until you load a different map. 

MTE doesn’t handle multiplayer communications and all that, but basically on picking up a potion you would use updateTile to remove the potion and send a command to all other player’s games to perform the same updateTile command.

#3

Thank you Dyson.

Makes sense and it works great

#4

I should clarify that the display object for the tile does not exist, nor the information supporting the display object, but the tile ID does exist within the map world arrays, no matter where you are in the map. The entirety of the map data is loaded together. Because of this, calling updateTile(input) can alter any ‘tile’ anywhere, onscreen or off, and this update will be persistent until you load a different map. 

MTE doesn’t handle multiplayer communications and all that, but basically on picking up a potion you would use updateTile to remove the potion and send a command to all other player’s games to perform the same updateTile command.

#5

Thank you Dyson.

Makes sense and it works great