The following screenshots are from my wysiwyg map editor. Not strictly-speaking isometric because I'm using DirectX8.1, but the tiling is in there. The first two shots are from a previous version, the rest are from the current version. All this is done with VB 6.0. The game engine uses the exact same renderer, so it runs at comparable speeds (actually, slightly faster because of reduced amounts of interface-handling code). Old Pic to show Geometrical Density Old Pic Isometric View Same shot in wireframe Same shot, flatter perspective Reverse view with a particle effect running Some of the particle properties you can set The Critter Editor A close-up of the texture blending (to show non-linear texture blending) Please excuse the quality of the graphics - they are still very much in-production. Mostly what I'm trying to show here is the amount of visual detail I could achieve with VB 6.0 (see bottom of the other thread for more). The frame rate here is on a 1.6ghz machine, GeForce 3 64MB and 128MB ram. I have a low-geometry setting that raises the frame rate up to 120 fps, as well as a low-texture resolution setting incase you have low memory. On the slowest machine I have around (a P2 650mhz Voodoo 3) I can get around 15 fps. This is a wysiwyg editor - texturing, terrain modification, model placement, property editing and particle effect creation is all real-time. Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough. Edited to fix hyperlinks [edited by - SoaringTortoise on March 23, 2003 4:57:27 AM] [edited by - SoaringTortoise on March 23, 2003 4:59:39 AM]

Just one more to show the maximum view depth. In this shot there are two arches. One close to the camera, and the other on the far side. This map looks a little weird because it''s a long, thin map and I''m not using any kind of interesting clipping yet (like fade to black, or walls, or something). However, this should give you a fair idea of the maximum view distance I can currently set. This is a pretty barren map (not much detail modelling), so it''s not really a fair representation, but then again I am not doing any depth optimisation on the terrain so... perhaps it''s not too unfair.

Long shot

Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

Oh, also, I forgot to mention. This is all running at design-time, not as an exe.

Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

Looks very nice. Great job

Thanks.

Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

How did you do the non-linear texture blending? Did you just create edge textures and use the surrounding tiles to pick which edge to use?

[edited by - Extrarius on March 23, 2003 10:09:25 PM]

The non-linear texture blending looks to me like a hand-drawn alpha texture. Nothing technically impressive, but nicely done. And apparently getting very good performance running under the IDE... good work, SoaringTortoise!

Thanks folks!

Wyrframe: Yeah, the texturing is hand-drawn alpha''s, but you can use custom-made blends to give you sharp/fuzzy/weird edges (like brick retaining walls etc.). I tried using computed blends, but I couldn''t stop them from being linear fades, and looking far too artificial. It''s taken a lot of effort to get it working fast within the IDE... more than half the code in my render loop is optimisation stuff.

Extrarius... yes, you''re completely correct. I''ve got 4 edge pieces that are selected based on the current tile''s surrounding pieces. Each of the 4 edge pieces are rotated accordingly. So... I''ve got a corner, a flat, an L and \ tile. I think this caters for all possible permutations for any given tile. I could carry on and do T pieces, but that''s unnecesessary.

Argus... sorry for that :-) Most of what I''m doing is technically butt-ugly, it''s the textures that make all the difference in the world, and right now I''m using the NVIDIA texture pack.

Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

Wyrframe, I think that the biggest technical challenge to the whole project was making it completely externally configured. The textures, the texture properties, the blending, the critters, the particles, the lighting, the terrain-editing brush shapes and the physics are all stored as external text files and just interpreted as required. Most of the actual rendering stuff is just brute-force approaches to problems.

Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.