It seems to me that all my posts lately have been something vs something else... Anyway, I have decided I want to work on a tile basted RTS game. I have a simple (one layer and growing...) tile engine for the map. This post may be a little ahead of myself, but what the heck. Should I have everything in my game be viewed top down (100% straight down... you can''t see the sides of anything) which is really easy (no need for multiple images for each direction... DD can rotate a single image) or should I go with somewhat-isometric images like in Warcraft II? The WII images would look better, but I am a really lousy animate object drawer (I am good at landscapes, trees, buildings, etc... really bad at animals/people). I don''t think I could draw all the units facing every direction, in every animation sequence... So I am leaning towards flat... any suggestions? --------------------

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I think on of the most important factor that should influence your descision is:

Will that player be able to tell the difference between the various units in a top-down map?

If the answer is NO then you should go for 45 degree top-down (warcraft/starcraft, etc. style)

If the answer is YES then you have two options, either do them the way you feel most comfortable with, or find yourself an artist to do them for you.

You could try the idea I''m using.

I like the isometric view, so I''m going to use it in my tile-based game. But I can''t draw, let alone at 30 degree incline at various rotations. So I''m going to use a 3D renderer to make it for me. You just make up one object, set up the camera at the right spot and type, and then render it at a whole bunch of different rotations. Heck, make an animation out of it!

How bout that?


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