Hey all,
I've built a cooperative multiplayer wildfire fighting game for Android and soon for iOS using Flash AS3, Starling and PlayerIO. As part of the wildfire simulation, I've built a large 2D array of objects to represent the terrain of the map. Each object in the array is fairly small, holding info on: location, type, state, etc. To date, the largest map has approx 77,000 terrain blits, which is large, but manageable on a mobile device.
Recently, I've been trying to build HUGE maps. The one we just finished building has 438,000+ terrain blits! On my laptop, it loads fine, but my phone totally crashes due to lack of memory (Note2). I've tried reducing the size of each object within the array, but it didn't help. It's still too big.
So my question is, when a player starts a new game, can I temporarily push that whole array of terrain objects into BigDB? Then, as the fire spreads and burns more trees and units interact with the terrain (cutting trees, spraying water, etc) that I can access any terrain object quickly?
Ultimately, what I'd like to do is have the 2D array of terrain objects already in BigDB for every map in my game. When a user starts the game, it'll duplicate the 2D Array into another temp table so as to manipulate the data for that session.
Anyway, just not sure how to proceed, or if BigDB is the right option for that. Perhaps using the C# code, I could hold all that info there. Any help to point me in the right direction is much appreciated!
Cheers,
Jason