Starting point for a tile map

Question

I am due to start work on a 2D platform game in Java using Java2D, and am trying to devise a way to create a world. I have been reading up about this for the last few hours now, and as far as I can tell, a relatively effective way is to have a text file with a "matrix" of values in it, which is read in by the program in order to create the map (stored in a 2D array).

Now, my plan is to have multiple JComponents that display ImageIcons for the various textures in the world; the JComponent object would depend on the character in the given array index.

1. Is there anything I may have overlooked?
2. Will this schematic work with a background image, i.e. when there is a character that represents a blank space, will part of the background be shown?

Apologies if this seems like a lazy question, I can assure you it is not out of laziness. I am merely trying to plan this out before hacking code together.

Answer 1

Unless you have compelling reason to, having a different component for each tile is probably not a good way to go. Look into a Canvas and displaying loaded images at different offsets in it.

Example: 480x640 Canvas 128x16 image file(contains 8 16x16 tile images) So your file has a bunch of numbers(characters etc.), we'll say 0-7 for the 8 tiles in the image. The file has 30x40 numbers, laid out in a grid the same as the canvas. So

1 2 1 3 4 8 2... ...

And to display the code ends up something like(not tested, based on docs)

Graphics g = //initialize graphics;
Image yourTileImage = //load your image;
for (int xpos = 0; xpos < maxX; xpos++)
    for (int ypos = 0; ; ypos < maxY; ypos++)
        int number = //get number from map file
        g.drawImage(Image yourTileImage,
            xpos * 16, ypos * 16, xpos * 16 + 15, ypos * 16 + 15,
            number*16, 0, number+15, 15,
            ImageObserver observer)

Which basically maps the number to your tile image, then puts that tile image into the right spot in the canvas(x,y) coordinates * size of tile.