I wanted to ask the community one thing: According to you the Infinity Engine of Baldur''s Gate uses tiles (squares, hexagonal etc.) or not?

It uses tiles, rectangular if I remember correctly. Haven''t this been discussed before?

A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.

Baldur''s Gate does not use tiles, at least not in respect to graphics. It is a basically a big giant bitmap that is scrolled by on you''re screen. The location walk/height map was created for each pre-rendered image to decide where or how you''re player can walk. The actual "size" and "shape" of the location data I''m not sure, its been a while since I cranked up the game.

Sieggy

Yes, that''s correct, Baldur''s Gate uses big bitmaps. The map is not composed of tiles.

An interesting thing about Fallout is that is uses square tilings for graphics but for movement and combat it uses hex-space

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StarCraft is another example. Their tiles are square but its still isometric (diamond, not hex though).

Sieggy

This whole square tile isometric view stuff is still giving me a headache.

Ok, I''m agree with uses of a big map, but what I don''t to understand is the implementation of the "path finding" and the "z-order" of the sprite blitting. You have an idea?

When you program 3D applications, you''ll see that the x and y coordinate is still left, just like in 2D graphics, but you have one more, a z coordinate, which (in almost all cases) is the depth axis, the bigger z value, the deeper into the scene the object is.

The z coordinate is sometimes used in 2D too to determine in what order the images should be rendered. It''s good if you want to have several layers of images rendered.

I don''t know much about pathfinding, but I don''t think that you have to write your own function for it unless you really want to, there''s one called A* which is supposed to be good.

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Daniel Netz, Sentinel Design
"I'm not stupid, I'm from Sweden" - Unknown

quote: Original post by Spiff

I don''t know much about pathfinding, but I don''t think that you have to write your own function for it unless you really want to, there''s one called A* which is supposed to be good.

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Yes, I know the A* algorithm, but on a big map without tiles it no work.