Saturday.
My "week-off" is nearly over.
As I look back at what I've achieved this week, I'm somewhat astounded by how little I've managed to get functioning correctly.

-=-=-

I spent HOURS on the Tilemap replacement stuff, yesterday.

I got buffer-drawing to almost work, but with so much glitchiness that it was completely unusable.

For starters, the 3DS engine frees up image data as it loads them into VRam. As such, I needed to reload a second copy of the tile-spritesheet so that I could refer to that when drawing tiles to the tilemap buffer.

And then there was the corruption.
I'm not sure where the corruption got into the buffer, I assume it was something to do with me repeatedly sending the same image to the VRam, but it was definitely going wrong somewhere.
Little splodges of "dirt" pixels gradually filled up the buffer until the 3DS eventually crashed. .. And that is NOT good!!!

...

So, I scrapped that, and re-attempted "pre-buffered array of 3D objects".
I figured the main issue I might've been having was that it had to keep declaring each and every tile, redoing the maths to find the co-ords of each tile, and the pixel-co-ords of the sprites on the tilemap, each and every frame.
Turns out, not so much. The code I've written for the main drawing functions seems to cope just about the same speed as the pre-buffered array.
It's the actual drawing of so many tiles that slows it down, not my shitty coding.

So... Now what?

There's one other thing I've not yet attempted, and I've been putting it off because I'm slightly worried that I don't have a flaming clue what I'm doing in the world of 3D.

Today I'll be taking a look at Voxel technology, in the vague hope that I can use that, with a locked top-down camera, in order to generate the same sort of effect as a simple tilemap.

I'll be honest. I don't have high hopes for this one.
Ho-hum!!

Might as well try it, though, eh?