i really should look at his code and see how it works

I was specifically refering to dragon warrior style where the map is scrolling and scrolls a set amont any time the player moves. I assume the "temp map" would have to be updated every step. I suppose you could have the "temp map" buffered several tiles in all dirrections and just update it when it gets to the edge of the buffer. Again im unsure of how it would be done in this sort of game.

That is pretty much what i figured, 1s are not walkable 0s are, and a test is done before movment(after a key is pressed) in order to see if that space is movable or not.(Makes logical sense). If you have the map data stored in one big file, where would u store the active map data in which the character is moving? Would u just copy it from the main map into a smaller one that represents the current player viewable area? and how would you have the charcter move within the map without corrupting the map data itself (IE if a character is on a tile in the map the data would have to reflect this and it would seem that it would overwrite the tile information)

Ahh its a shame xlib doesnt support strings . ANy idea what kind of speed you'd get on an 83+ BE? I dont have an se. I'm also unsure of what u mean by "dual layer" Do you mean it continusly alternates between 2 differnt sprites in order to create a diffrent looking sprite?

ok,that makes sense. Why would strings cause a slow down when used with sprites instead of text though?

It looks like a really odd version of the SIMS, but with dragons........

I'm sorry cause i know this question will sound a bit noobish. I was just wondering exactly what a tilemapper does. From what i understand it stores map data in a matrix, but exactly what data does it contain regarding the map and what all functions does it handle? If someone could post some commented code(or psuedo code), this would help greatly as well.