I am reading data from a text file which will have the layout for a level, for example:
1 1 0 0 0 0 G G G
1 1 0 0 0 0 R R R
1 1 0 0 0 0 B B B
1 1 0 0 0 0 G G G
1 1 0 0 0 0 R R R
1 1 0 0 0 0 B B B
The characters are read to determine what to place in that position in the scene, so a 1 is a standard grey platform, while R, G, and B represent coloured platforms. This works fine but each platform us made up of 1x1 squares which is later particularly inefficient when I change the platform colours as part of the game.
In order to reduce the number of platforms, I want to determine if the neighbouring characters in the text file are the same as the current one and form platforms based on that, so in the example above, there would be one standard grey platform 2 wide and 6 long.
Update:
When reading from the text file, I now check the next tile in the column to see if it is the same and scale up a 1x1 platform to whatever size is necessary, so in the example above, there would be 2 1x6 grey platforms, and 6 1x1 red, green, and blue platforms. I have done it this way because it is easy enough to check the rest of a column (I could also do rows but have started with columns) and then the shape of the platform will never matter.
My issue remains the same:
If I was the check all neighbours (so rows and columns), how would I go about determining the shape and position of the overall platform? And what if I have a non regular quadrilateral (e.g. with a hole in the middle, or perhaps a triangle, etc)? The issue here is I wouldn’t be able to simply scale up a 1x1 platform. If that could somehow be created, that would be ideal, but if not, I would want to create the shape out of the fewest total number of platforms.