Request for bigger blocks

[lukebord1]

Hi Jonathan,
i know you're involved with Encyclopaedia Galactica this period, but i'd like to submit to you an interesting idea about AGD.

Many great Spectrum games (Robin of the Woods, Exolon, etc.) have a playing scenario with very big graphic blocks.

AGD lets to build screens by using single chr blocks. Just for example, i've created 24 different blocks (!) in order to have a big rock wall on my screen.

Do you think it could be possible to build custom-sized blocks (maybe powered with a screen$ import tool, to avoid the manual pixel digit inside blocks) ?

[Jonathan Cauldwell]

At some point in the near future, possibly as early as next year, I'm intending to move from 8x8 to 16x16 blocks. This should have the added benefit of allowing larger maps as screens will require less memory.

However, it will make the block editor slightly more complicated as each block will have 4 properties, one for each quarter.

[BiNMaN]

When we did dizzy and the likes we used a 16x16 block. Each block only had one property (solid, pass through platform, open space, slope etc). Would each of the bigger blocks need 4 properties?

Bigger blocks allow you to build quicker and have more complex designs (per block) and keep the screen compression low but you can find yourself repeating textures on 16x16 blocks which you wouldn't do with 8x8's.

[eltonbird]

Could you do this like was done on the Sega Saturn? A 16x16 block is just 4 IDs from your 8x8 block graphics.  So you don't end up with any duplication of image data  where parts of tiles are the same.

So you build your 8x8 blocks as normal, then make "super blocks" (16x16s) out of them (so for each quadrant, select the block index for it)
Then have a toggle to decide if screens are layed out in blocks or super blocks?

eg.

blocks:-
0123456789 (index)
ABCDEFGHIJ (image)

super blocks:- (each group of 4 is the blocks used for each square)
0123 4567 0765

Sceen Data:-
012012
2

Result:-
ABEFAH
CDGHGF
AH
GF