Hi,
I'm writing a 2D game similar to Dungeon Keeper. I have a view that looks at a grid of sprites, and can be scrolled around by the mouse. I optimized the world view by only drawing sprites that are near the view (or camera if you will).
I also have a map in the bottom left corner that draws the entire world with a different set of sprites, but which are still representative of what is seen in the main view. Each map sprite contains 9 pixels, whereas each world sprite contains 48 * 48. Now, the map sprites and view sprites used to be the same sprites, but I hoped that making a second smaller sprite that was drawn every frame would be less intensive. I did not see any visual performance increase from the change. Is that what should be expected?
Now, the game only modifies one sprite at a time, so it would be very easy to draw the map once and then make a change and draw that change whenever necessary. But doing that yields some undesirable results, like screen flickering (I actually broke a monitor doing that lol).
Beyond these two options, I'm rather clueless about how to optimize my map drawing process. Anyone willing to give me some suggestions?