I've been doing some research around the net and unfortuantely due to the massive amount of info on tile based engines and the age of some of the information available, I find myself a little bit of a loss. My query is this, using XNA it's quite easy to create a grid of tiles and orientate the camera so that it appears to be isometric, in much the same way as this article describes http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article935.asp Now this I can do easy and I love the fact that the tile graphics used can be rectangular, taking away the need for complicated graphic design. My problem is how would you use say, a wall graphic? Or similar?? All the examples I find use isomtrically drawn tiles (diamond shapes with lots of transparent areas) - however this is not the same as the tile used for the example. I can't see how you could have a rectangular graphic of a wall and have it displayed isometrically in the engine in the tutorial... Am I making sense?? Basically, how would you go about adding walls and the like to the above tutorial without using diamond shaped tiles in the first place?? Or can't you?? Hope someone can just shed a little light on this so I can get round to sorting out my engine. Kil. P.S. Just as a side note, I did try creating a fully fledge 3d engine based around Riemers tutorials, unfortunately the shear amount of time / effort required to create all those 3d models and textures is more than I can afford - hence my move to old school isometric (like diablo but without diamond shaped graphics) so I can focus more on content and less on looks.

Why would you want to do that? Like, where's the point in not using diamond-shape tiles? Well, nevermind, your choice. Basically, if you're doing diamond-shaped stuff, you just rotate your graphics (like, usually 45 degree).

So, in order to do those graphics I'd suggest you take a couple of diamond-shaped graphics, rotate them back (re-align them with a rectangular grid) and see how they look.

Just maybe, you need not change so much. I'm no graphical artist myself, but I've once implemented a hexagonal-isometric engine, and the graphics made by our artist looked just fine...

Hope that helps,
best regards,


Lukas