This has really been bugging me, and of course I will not be using 3D, because that will require more skills. But anyway, my game will be top-down 2d which means the camera looks directly down onto the 50x50 tiles on an 800*600(default) screen. But the problem with looking directly down for my rpg, is that you wont always know how tall things really are. Since my game is sci-fi (which has TALL buildings) i dont know how i could sucessfully make the building look tall from a down ways point of view, easily at least. Because if a building is so tall, then you would never see the roof since the camera stays at a certain distance above ground. And i dont like isometric, because if u try to show a tall building there, it would never end, the tallness, also isometric is harder to draw and i dont want to waste my texture quality ad resolution for isometric id rather make high-quality top-down tiles. For dungeons this will work find. but im worried about the buildings, and the moutains and tress for this view. any ideas?

I've never done something like that but maybe shadows would give you the impression of height?

Yes I've will be doing that too, but the keyest problem is that if a building is tall and you cant see the roof of it(most likely), unless the camera was REALLY far away.

It is orthographic and there is no z division? That means you can put the camera REALLY far away without scaling x/y down.

Or display what's inside the skyscraper and let the shadows take care of height.

My old game dev team and I had a similar problem. We were creating an ORPG about a floating city station that orbited new planets for colonization. The buildings were required to be quite tall, since the remains of Earths inhabitants, still 1 billion+, needed to fit in such a small space. And our solution was this: Give up on trying to show the roofs (rooves?).

The problem is the fact that youre trying to tile a skyscraper, which is proportionally 100 times taller than your character, onto a screen that is only 20 times taller than your character. In other words, if you tile a skyscraper starting from the bottom of your screen, and make it big enough for your typical 24x32 sprite to fit in it proportionally, it can only be about 15-20 stories high before it hits the top of your screen.

Realistically though, you have a couple options:

- Reduce the size of your sprite, so that you can lower the proportion of the skyscraper, allowing for more stories to be visible on the screen.
- Chuck the whole proportion thing all together and make the skyscrapers small enough (in size, not in stories) so that they fit on the screen, but leave your character the same height, using the buildings as icons instead of actual buildings.
- Make your skyscrapers max out at 20 stories.

Thats really the only way. I prefer method 2 myself, because if you do the other two, youre going to have a screen full of buildings which may only allow enough roaming room for one street running up and down the screen, unless you want to use LOTS of transparency to be able to see the character as they travel from one building to the next.

Umm, are you sure you didn't misunderstand something? It sounds like you are thinking about something like sim tower (side view), while the OP is more like GTA.

To the OP:
I don't really think you can do it in a better way than using shadows really. Or the GTA way, but then you'll need some basic 3D..

Paralax effect. Compose a tall object as multi-layered sprites, think them like many pieces of paper on a stick. Wisely draw them, then adjust relative position to object pivot point and you create the sensation of 3D and height (if you move in the four directions they move with different speed.

Anyway, you can hardly display bridges or connected buildings with this system without being trully 3d.

i see what codman means, but the problem with it seem that when you move a certain way down the screen, since the tall building will show more of the "face" it will be hard to reveal the windows and such. Also this is hard because some of my buildings curve at the tops, its a futuristic architecture lol. Anyway, I will proabably just keep it 2d top down, and just use diagnaled shadows, and if its more than 15 stories or whatever, then the roof i guess either shows the 15th story, or just black. Dunno what the best way to prove that a building is off the screen tho. Also do you think 50x50 is a good tile size, ive tried 40x40 and its too small. I layed out 50x50 tiles on a 800*600 canvas and it seems just right, what do you think? also my games can go full-screen to 1280*1024. No, it does not expand textures, that would be dumb, but it just shows more tiles and entities at once. But i will have "fog view" to keep things fair and stuff hidden behind trees. Also what do you think is the best way to handel big trees for top-down. My char can go under the trees, but there will be collision detection for the stem bark. stuff is supposed to be hidden in fog view for stuff hiddeing behind the trees tho.

The parallax effect was done to great effect on this site. Look around; lots of easter eggs.

that is a good example, but i dont see how i can do that without using 3d, because the parallexed sides need to be textured...