Book Image

jQuery Game Development Essentials

By : Selim Arsever
Book Image

jQuery Game Development Essentials

By: Selim Arsever

Overview of this book

jQuery is a leading multi-browser JavaScript library that developers across the world utilize on a daily basis to help simplify client-side scripting. Using the friendly and powerful jQuery to create games based on DOM manipulations and CSS transforms allows you to target a vast array of browsers and devices without having to worry about individual peculiarities."jQuery Game Development Essentials" will teach you how to use the environment, language, and framework that you're familiar with in an entirely new way so that you can create beautiful and addictive games. With concrete examples and detailed technical explanations you will learn how to apply game development techniques in a highly practical context.This essential reference explains classic game development techniques like sprite animations, tile-maps, collision detection, and parallax scrolling in a context specific to jQuery. In addition, there is coverage of advanced topics specific to creating games with the popular JavaScript library, such as integration with social networks alongside multiplayer and mobile support. jQuery Game Development Essentials will take you on a journey that will utilize your existing skills as a web developer so that you can create fantastic, addictive games that run right in the browser.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
jQuery Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Optimizing tile maps for top-down games


The tile map we implemented in the last chapter works well for side scrollers as they typically use a sparse matrix to define their levels. This means that if your level is 100 tiles long and 7 tiles high, it will contain way less than 700 tiles. This allows us to create all those tiles at the beginning of the game.

For a typical top-down game, we find ourselves in a very different situation. Indeed, in order to render the map, all the possible tiles of the tile map used are defined. This means we will have at least 700 tiles for the same level of dimensions. The situation becomes even worse if we use many layers. To reduce this number in order to increase performances, we will have to generate only the tiles that are visible at startup. Then when the view moves, we will have to track which tiles become invisible and delete them, and which tiles become visible and generate them.

There is a tradeoff here; adding and removing tiles will take time, and...