I'd like to create a tactical game similar to Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea (and many others I'm sure). The game will be in true 3D but will use orthographic projection (for an isometric look and feel). Here are some examples of what I'm trying to achieve: (many more pictures located here: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=391326 (more pictures located here: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/mod/journal/journal.asp?jn=403398&cmonth=3&cyear=2008 It seems like both use "3D tiles" but I'm not sure. Does 3D tiles imply no height? ...or would you need a tilemap including height? (eg. 200x200x15) The other problem is that there are additional structures (trees, building, etc) on the map. I think that some of them can be climbed (eg. flat buildings) but others cannot (trees). What are some ideas on how to create/render these levels? Should I use a 3d tilemap that includes height (eg. 200x200x15) and then have an additional array of buildings or something? An alternative is to create entire 3D level as a single model or like a regular BSP map (or whatever), but this seems more difficult, I think. Thanks for any advice!

Anybody?

For a similar project I'm working on I just create the terrain as a mesh and use the triangles for collision detection. Their are a lot of ways you can do this, I'm using this method mainly so I can use a 3D graphics application as a level editor.
If this doesn't answer your question can you be a bit more specific about what you want to achieve.

[Edited by - Kaze on May 13, 2009 10:42:37 PM]

Thanks again for the advice.

I've created a simple prototype in XNA using cubes and mesh instancing and it actually works pretty good but I'm having second thoughts about the artistic aspect.

My terrain of 50x50 cubes (2500 cubes, 25000 triangles?) is rendering at over 3000 fps on my 8800 GTX and even gets 200 fps on another machine that only has a very cheap integrated graphics card).

However, I'm really not sure if I want to proceed with the cube terrain and might just use a real 3D model like you originally suggested...

That is basically what it came down to for me too, cubes have the advantage of being simple to implement and maps can be made from a small tile set and simple editor but they look like cubes, I'm trying 3d models for maps but I might go back to cubes depending on how well the process of feeding trimesh data into the physics engine to create a pseudo grid map goes.

What do you mean by your last statement? (eg. feeding trimesh data into the physics engine to create the grid)

Actually, can you explain a little about how you plan to create/draw the grid?

I was thinking about drawing a bunch of planes on top of my cubes which seems fairly simple...

First that its possible to test for collisions of a basic shape against a raw 3d mesh.
Second that I want sprites to have free movement as oppose to being locked to squares in a chess like board but I still need to create a 2d grid of what squares are passable to help the AI find paths from point A to B.