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Welcome to the Kthura wiki!

This Wiki will contain, all nice things to know about Kthura. Please note, the Kthura map system is object oriented and therefore a lot more sophisticated than a regular tile based map system, but therefore also A LOT more complicated and harder to understand and master. Kthura maps require a lot more technical and graphical insight to create than tile based maps. If you are up to the challenge, well, then let's go for it ;)

Tile based vs. Kthura

• Tile based is easy, straight to the point. Just place in a tile. It can be easy to create something in a few mouse clicks that looks good, where Kthura uses objects that need to be properly set up with the right parameters. Particularly when it comes to the "Dominance" parameter, we got an essential part of Kthura were you can very easily mess things up.
• But Kthura can more easily tweak things, where a Tile based engine cannot do this at all. Trees in a forest not all on a grid pattern, but in a more "natural" manner, make objects bigger, smaller, rotate them, color them at will. This requires you know what you are doing, but if you do, you can get nice effects no tile based map engine can provide. Look well at the games "Star Story" and "The Fairy Tale REVAMPED" and perhaps you can see, what kind of stuff was only possible thanks to Kthura.

Is Kthura faster or more memory friendly than tile based engines.

Not necessarily. In the forest locations in the two games I mentioned before, I really had to watch out, as each tree takes up more memory as they would do in a tile based engine. In the Astrilopup facility however I could save on the RAM since most of the walls and floors were just one object per area. A wall 4000 pixels long and a wall 40 pixels long would take exactly the same amount of RAM in Kthura, if you put both in just one object. Although I would recommend against using one object for such a long wall, as your system performance can go down, as the system will have to repeat that tile over and over. Although Kthura will try to use the fastest routine known to me to render this, finding the proper balance between size and memory usage can be a challenge sometimes. I found out the hard way myself during the production of the Fairy Tale REVAMPED as my computer slowed down a bit on the ancient Fairy Altar due to oversized objects. Kthura will normally not render stuff that doesn't end up on screen, but with oversized objects, it will always take the entire object and if the underlying graphics API isn't that sophisticated.. then....

I would certainly not recommend to use Kthura for an old DOS game considering that 640kb limit (not sure how much trouble DOS/4GW can take away on that). Although Kthura can be RAM friendlier (in a properly set up map), there is not really much "control" how big stuff gets, and a tile based map mostly takes up the same amount of RAM regardless how complex a map is, where Kthura can get out of control if you make really complex maps.