vedioboy
Hmm interesting, I would love to test out isometric someday but it seems to be a pain in the ass to use. Definitely something Danik should look into for future updates.
Tile System - Isometric and Other Perspective adaptations.
M
Mindrage
The tile system is great, i love it for top down art and sidecsrollers, but i sort of feel limited to those perspectives.
But ingeneral there are 2 features that could fix that.
The first is Overlapping.
In Isometric Games, usually a square is overlapped by certain pixels in the x and y axis separately.
A more easier perspective to inspect is this inspired by ultima online
:
Here you see that the tile is connected only at the base, its only 32x32px, but the entire sprite is 48x48, that means, that the overlap in this case would have been 16px (48 - 32, 48 - 32) in both, x and y axis.
Now it would work with this perspective, however when doing isometric there is another factor that must be added,
its the offset in x, y for each tile.
But ingeneral there are 2 features that could fix that.
The first is Overlapping.
In Isometric Games, usually a square is overlapped by certain pixels in the x and y axis separately.
A more easier perspective to inspect is this inspired by ultima online
:Here you see that the tile is connected only at the base, its only 32x32px, but the entire sprite is 48x48, that means, that the overlap in this case would have been 16px (48 - 32, 48 - 32) in both, x and y axis.
Now it would work with this perspective, however when doing isometric there is another factor that must be added,
its the offset in x, y for each tile.
Here you see that each tile has a certain x and y offset for each row in thier axis.
That would be plenty to make it work seamlessly.
Another factor would be the draw order for each tile for when they overlap. Like from top to bottom, and left to right or vise versa.
So how i suggest the option screen to look like is something like this:
Here the last icons are switches between the draw order of tiles, the last picture is the Layer Draw Order, from top to bottom.
Some issues with this is that selecting a tile can be hard to predict, but to have a state of a "Active" tile when selecting makes things pretty good.
So now you could stack layers to make multiple floors, and you could make isometric sprites with ease.
Some things that might be concidered is that maybe the Tiling Layers should be separate from Image layers,
So people can try map and not having to conflict with the coloring of an object.
Also, for people who make animated tiles, you should link the animations for each tile instead of multiple tiles. Like frames for a tile.
So a bullet list summeration:
That would be plenty to make it work seamlessly.
Another factor would be the draw order for each tile for when they overlap. Like from top to bottom, and left to right or vise versa.
So how i suggest the option screen to look like is something like this:
Here the last icons are switches between the draw order of tiles, the last picture is the Layer Draw Order, from top to bottom.
Some issues with this is that selecting a tile can be hard to predict, but to have a state of a "Active" tile when selecting makes things pretty good.
So now you could stack layers to make multiple floors, and you could make isometric sprites with ease.
Some things that might be concidered is that maybe the Tiling Layers should be separate from Image layers,
So people can try map and not having to conflict with the coloring of an object.
Also, for people who make animated tiles, you should link the animations for each tile instead of multiple tiles. Like frames for a tile.
So a bullet list summeration:
- Offset for tiles for each axis
- Overlap for tiles for each axis
- Draw Order for each tile
- Seperate Layer System for tiles.
Multiple frames linked to a single tile instead of a multiple tiles for a single one.
(Could be used for animations, Normal Maps, Masks and so on.)
zi11ion
I love Tactics and isometric games! (Playing through Onimusha Tactics on the GBA right now). However, without any good tools to make it easier to manage 2d isometric level art, I think I'll stick to a Final Fantasy Tactics WotL PS1 era polygon type approach, at least for the environments.