How does one have a scrolling map and detect collision on it?
I have tried a tile map but dont want to use this technique.
I would like to learn how a games background can be scrolled as well as object are detected for collision.
One example would be this game.
If one is not using tilemaps for this, how is the world scrollable as well as having physical objects detecting collision with the character sprite?
Please point me in the right direction on this topic.
Simple collision detection is done by checking to see if bounding boxes (or sometimes, bounding circles) overlap. That is, given object A and object B, if their bounding boxes overlap, then a collision has occurred.
If you want to get fancy, you create polygons for your objects and determine if the bounding polygons overlap. That's more complicated and harder to get right, and also involves considerably more processing.
It's not really much different from using a tilemap. With a tilemap, you're doing collision detection against the tiles. Without a tilemap you're doing collision detection against the bounding boxes of individual objects. The logic is almost identical.
Additional info:
I think the problem you're struggling with is that you're thinking in terms of screens. It's important when writing a game to separate the concept of the game world (the model) from the presentation (the screen).
For example, a simple side scroller game might consist of many "screens" full of information. Whereas the screen might be 1000 units wide, the game's world could be 10,000 or 100,000 units wide. Note that I say "units" rather than "pixels". A game's unit of measure could be inches, centimeters, miles, or whatever. All of your game logic should work in terms of world coordinates. How you project that onto the view (the screen) is irrelevant to what goes on in the world.
Every object in the world is assigned a position in world coordinates. That includes the player sprite, which is moving around in the world. All collision detection and other interaction of objects in the world is done in terms of world coordinates.
To simplify things, assume that there is a one-to-one mapping between world units and screen units. That is, your world is 10,000 pixels wide, and your screen is 1,000 pixels wide. The world, then is "ten screens" in size. More correctly, the screen can view 1/10 of the world. If that's the case, then your view can be defined by the left-most world coordinate that's visible. So if the world coordinate 2,000 is at the left of your screen, the rightmost column of pixels on your screen will be world coordinate 2,999.
This implies that you need world-to-screen and screen-to-world transformation functions. For this case, those functions are very simple. If we assume that there's no vertical scrolling, then only the x coordinate needs to be transformed by subtracting the world x coordinate from the view x coordinate. That is, world.x - viewOrigin.x. So in the case above, the screen coordinate of an object that's at world x coordinate 2,315 would be (2,315 - 2,000), or 315. That's the x coordinate of the object's position on the screen. In the current view.
The screen-to-world is the opposite: add the object's screen coordinate to the view's origin: 315 + 2,000 = 2,315.
I can't stress how important it is to maintain this separation between world and view coordinates. All of your game logic should operate in terms of world coordinates. You update the view to show you what's happening in the world. In a side scroller, you typically move the view left and right based on the player's actions. If the player moves left, you move the view origin left. If the player moves right, you move the view origin to the right.
Once you internalize this idea, things become much simpler. Everything done in the game world happens in the world. You make sure that the world state is consistent, and then you worry about displaying a view of the world.
There's no easier way (that I know of) to build a game that's larger than the screen. No matter how you build it, you have to have some concept of showing just part of the world on the view. By formalizing it, you separate the presentation from the game logic and things get much, much simpler.