Question About Packing Maps into one file?

[jaypaul]

Hi Friends,

I've started work on building a 2d tile based platform game, and have just been wondering about how to store/distribute the games levels.

this game allows you to load a 'World' which is made up of potentially up to 10000 map files (A 100x100 grid, though most of the time this grid won't be filled). The map files are just more grids of tiles.

Anyways, I't seems like having up to 10000 small files in a folder seems like a inefficient way to do this. I tried to find the answers of this query but unable to find anything extremely helpful.

I figure that the best thing to do would be to compile all the maps into one world file, and just load that file into memory.

I have thought about just creating one xml file to store everything, but I'm not too sure about it.

Your Answers will be Helpful.

Thanks,
Paul