Map editor -questions

[darekg11]

Hello, as You all know guys adding elements one by one is kinda annoying so I decided as everyoen to create my own Map Editor, it's not going to be tile based. I will use GTK+ to create whole GUI system, but I have some question:
1)There are going to be some layers, like non-collising,collising,NPC etc and non collision is going to be the biggest one. I will create that layer from sprites for example 50x50 big and I want to place like 50 of them, now it will be ridiculous to later need to use 50 sprites in game to create background. Should I group the sprites into a big background image and save it as seperate file? and then just use one sprite for it? I think it will be a lot better solution.
2)How should save the fiel format, or all that data? I want to do simple file where it's all listed in several groups. Collision, NPC etc and then pack it to RAR file secured with password and durning game just unpack archieve and when closing game it would be automatically deleted, is it good way to secure somehow files from being changed?


Thanks in advance for answers, best regards Darek.

[Disch]

is it good way to secure somehow files from being changed?

Why wouldn't you want them to be changed?

Game modding is a great way to let your game's userbase grow.  Adds replayability, etc.  If anything you should make the files easy to modify.

[darekg11]

I know but this game is just being made to gain some experience around 2D graphic and it will be give only to my friends, since it's game about them
And I don't want them to like draw some dicks to character animation, I know that they would ^.^

[tntexplosivesltd]

Is it really that much of a problem? If you make it able to be changed, you can then use most of the same concepts for future games you make.

[nulloid]

There is an easier way to have hard-to-change data. Say you have an image, than make an array of it. For example, for a 64x64 pixel image, the array would like imageArray[64][64][4] (width x height x color component (R, G, B, A)). All you have to do is write a program, that reads an image, and outputs the corresponding source file, which is simply an array declaration with all the data inside. Than you can just copy it to your program's source code, and you can use it as you want. I used this method some time ago, pretty easy. One thing to be prepared is the huge source files (from an image, the source is about 10 times bigger). So you may want to handle them seperately and just include them.