DX7 - DD surfaces...

Hiyas,

In my game I currently have several seperate tilesets (each one is used for different maps).

I'm thinking about setting this up differently though... What I'm considering is combining all the tilesets into one. Each tile from the set has it's own BMP file.

I'm thinking of only loading the tiles/BMPs as surfaces if they are in use in the current map (a check will be made to see if they're in use). This saves loading all the tiles at once, which would otherwise chew up a lot of memory/performance.

Hypothetical: The tileset is about 700 tiles big. Map A uses mostly tiles from 0>200. Map B uses mostly tiles from around 500>700. Since map B is using tiles which are bigger, does this mean that the game would be slower when running Map B? (what I'm basically asking is if using bigger numbers in an array of surfaces/tile data would slow things down)

BTW I'm running DX7/DD.

Thanks for any help,

-Git

In all accounts it should run faster! Fewer blits means faster time. Think of it this way: is it faster to blit 1 pixel areas or a full screen area? It would be faster in Map B because you can't fit as many tiles onscreen.

[EDIT]
Whoops, misunderstood your question. No, it shouldn't make a difference if you have larger numbers in the array.