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If I recall correctly, Blizzard did Starcraft with a normal perspective tile engine (i.e. not isometric). They tweaked it to look Iso. In the end, in a post-mortem type interview, they mentioned that it was a lot more work to do things this way, and if they had to do it over, they would have gone straight Iso.
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Correct. On the other hand one of the age of empires developers mentioned how glad he was they used a proper 3D coordinate system right from the start. Doing all that fancy arrow trajectory stuff in the game would have been next to impossible otherwise.
neonstar:
> i''ve done the psuedo-iso approach before, and it''s a good bit easier to code for
Can you elaborate on this? I imagine it to be the other way around. I.e. 2D tilemap is easy, iso is harder and fake iso is the toughest/hackiest. What''s harder in real iso than in 2D is stuff like drawing order and maybe screen-to-world transform (i.e. the famous: what tile have I clicked proplem). Although I don''t really get the problem with the latter. It''s a trivial mathematical transform if you know just a little linear algebra (i.e. base-change matrices). No need for mouse-maps etc...
> Of course, he''s right about physics being harder
No he''s wrong. What method you use to display your stuff should have no impact on your physics calculations whatsoever. My engine uses a 3D coordinate system for all physics calculations and it''s straightforward and easy to use. You don''t have to worry about the display at all. My x,y coordinate axes are aligned with the iso axes and z is up. That way physics only have to deal with square tiles. Those calculations are not even aware of the fact the world will be displayed rotated by 45°...
Now if you try to fake iso perspective with square tiles you might get into trouble if that fake display makes it impossible for you to seperate display from physics code (very likely). So fake iso can only be harder for physics, not easier.
regards,
BuschnicK
Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
blackfish.sourceforge.net