Some basic questions (What now?)
Author
Hi, ive got my Iso' tile engine rendering tiles from a .txt tile map and have a few questions.
1) Should the tiles containing my floor tiles be 32x32 or 32x16 ? At the moment im using 32x16 because the rombus fits exactly into it... but when considering walls, etc i see that for some things bigger tiles are needed.
2) Should i layer or stack for walls, items and dressing ? i.e should i render the floor in 1 pass, the walls in pass 2 and items/misc in pass 3 OR have each squares data in the tilemap hold information on what goes in that square and place multiple items in thier positions in a single pass?
3) where can i get good tutorials on drawing Isometric graphics... so far its easy to do the floor tiles rotate 45 degrees and squash down to half size. but things like walls, items, etc seel harder
Thanks.
James.
1). I use the 2:1 (32x16) tile ratio, it looks better in the long run, imho.
2). Layers work great. I treat the walls as a sprite and handle the collissions just the same as any other sprites. If your walls are sprites, they aren't bound to the size or shape of the tiles. However, it's a good idea to try to restrict them so the look and feel is consistent.
Multi-pass rendering is better. That way objects that should be on top of other objects will appear to be so. Just try to keep a look-up table of what tiles on the map have changed and which haven't. Don't draw portions that don't need to be updated. Actually I've seen one article (don't remember which) that recommended copying every single portion of the screen that hasn't changed into a chunk... and shifting it over by 1 tile's width/height for updating after scrolling by one tile to save doing several blits. It is'nt a bad idea if you can do it properly. But might turn into more of a headache than it's worth.
3). Items shouldn't really be all that much of an issue. Sprites are the bigger problem. To answer you, I haven't a clue. I'm not an artist.
2). Layers work great. I treat the walls as a sprite and handle the collissions just the same as any other sprites. If your walls are sprites, they aren't bound to the size or shape of the tiles. However, it's a good idea to try to restrict them so the look and feel is consistent.
Multi-pass rendering is better. That way objects that should be on top of other objects will appear to be so. Just try to keep a look-up table of what tiles on the map have changed and which haven't. Don't draw portions that don't need to be updated. Actually I've seen one article (don't remember which) that recommended copying every single portion of the screen that hasn't changed into a chunk... and shifting it over by 1 tile's width/height for updating after scrolling by one tile to save doing several blits. It is'nt a bad idea if you can do it properly. But might turn into more of a headache than it's worth.
3). Items shouldn't really be all that much of an issue. Sprites are the bigger problem. To answer you, I haven't a clue. I'm not an artist.
This is a good read. Even if you don't use Direct X, the way you treat IsoHex is the same. I use SDL and have implemented much of this book's code in SDL.
Isometric Game Programming with DirectX 7.0 I think the moderator of this forum is even the author if I'm not mistaken.
Isometric Game Programming with DirectX 7.0 I think the moderator of this forum is even the author if I'm not mistaken.
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