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Isometrics: Why Diamonds?

turtle1776 · 2002-05-01T14:16:19

I know that there are others out there who have played with isometrics, so maybe one of you can answer some questions that I have that I wasn''t able to find answers to on the net. My question is this: Why is it necessary to use diamond shaped tiles when using an isometric view? All of the articles out there on the net start with the diamond shape, explain why it is more complicated to deal with than a simple square, but then don''t explain why the diamond is necessary. It seems to me that anything that could be represented using a diamond shaped tile, and then displayed on a rectangular computer screen, could also be represented with a square/rectangular tile and then displayed on that same rectangular computer screen. Given this, why burden yourself with a diamond shaped tile, which has *lots* of drawbacks including: * the need to use a masked or transparent image (slower) because the individual tiles overlap each other. * the need for strange map coordinate systems since the tiles aren''t lined up in nice rows and columns, but are instead staggered/offset from one row to the next. This makes things like simple movement and pathfinding (my last major project) problematic. Given these cons, what are the pros of the diamond shaped tile?

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by turtle1776 April 30, 2002 12:59 PM

10 comments, last by turtle1776 21 years, 11 months ago

doorstop

122

May 01, 2002 01:50 PM

I see where you are coming from but here is a good example I''ve thought of. Imagine that your trying to draw a wall, to make the wall look 3D you would have to draw it at a diagonal. Using square or rectangular tiles would leave a large potion of the tile sticking out perpendicular to the wall. Fair enough I here you say but what happens when you put in a character, to make sure that you cannot walk through the wall you would have to make the tile impassable. This would mean that at every tile along the wall you would have an impassable, invisible section around the wall, the character would just get stuck on something that the player cannot see.

Extrarius

1,412

May 01, 2002 02:16 PM

In order to make the wall 3d, why not use 3d graphics? You can have an isometric game be truly 3d. For a simple example, look at empire earth. To me the game was truly lacking in many areas (the AI blatantly cheated worse than any AI I''ve seen, and in the map maker it even had an option to disable AI cheating, but you couldnt load maps in multiplayer, so...), but the graphics were simple, it was basically isometric. The wall could be straight ''down'' (toward the screen) and you could tell it was 3d because of perspective. When the camera is far to the left of the wall, you could see the left side of the wall. When the camera is staring straight at the wall, you can''t see either side, only the ''front'' and top, and when on the right side, you see the right side depending on how far away the camera is. Much more convincing 3D than using 2d sprites/tiles/whatever =-)

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Isometrics: Why Diamonds?

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Isometrics: Why Diamonds?

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