Do games like "Command and Conquer:Red Alert" still use tile engines for their graphics? Their maps/screens don''t look tiled at all, and they have so much detail that it looks (to me) that they have one large image file used as land. -- Dave

Most games like that use tiles in one form or another. I would imagine that they do some blending on the tiles'' edges, to make the joining of two tiles look smooth.

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Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill

Didn''t one of the C&C series ship with the editor (red alert)? They are definately tilebased games. I remember from using the editor that they only used ''brushes'' of tiles though, i.e. lots of tiles put together forming an object. For example, you could only stamp down huge parts of a bridge instead of constructing it from individual tiles. That is a mixed blessing, on the one hand you are much faster in putting together whole maps, on the other hand you lose lots of flexibility since the brushes only fit together seamlessly in very few combinations. Maps end up looking quite similar...

BuschnicK


Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
http://blackfish.sourceforge.net

Starcraft shipped with a campaign editor inwhich you could place down sections of landscape and it would (re)arrange the surrounding tiles to fit seamlessly. Very cleverly done (and I think I have finally worked out how they did it). Starcraft used pre-drawn transition tiles. Though it looks isometric, Starcraft is really composed of square 32x32 pixel 256-colour tiles. They are just cleverly drawn to look isometric.

The Command & Conquer series of games are also tile-based as are the Age Of Empires series. The AoE series are true isometric. AoE used hand-drawn transition tiles while its sequel Age of Kings did real-time blending to create transitions. For some really good info on how they are done, take a look at the Tactics Engine Manual available for Dark Reign. Dark Reign may be a few years old now (it originally came out in 1997), but it used square 24x24 pixel 256-colour tiles in a certain way that allowed it to blend tiles on-the-fly between different types of tiles. The Tactics Engine Manual, available from the Auran website (or at least it was when I last looked), goes into great detail about how this system works.


Steve ''Sly'' Williams  Code Monkey  Krome Studios

Wow, Steve, I didn''t know the StarCraft tile bit...that''s what I''m doing with my new game, mostly because I''m a lazy bum and real isometrics are evil. But I digress...


Note:

ENTRY FROM EDWARD ROPPLE''S DICTIONARY OF REALLY TECHNICAL TERMS (tm):
E-vil. adj. 1.Annoying and difficult to program. 2. See 1.

>
Wow, Steve, I didn''t know the StarCraft tile bit...that''s what I''m doing with my new game, mostly because I''m a lazy bum and real isometrics are evil. But I digress...
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You should think twice before going down that route. You''ll most likely have *more* work faking iso than doing it right from the start. The starcraft team has written about their problems with this approach - unfortunately I can''t remember where, I think it was a gamasutra postmortem or something. Their conclusion was they''d never do it again that way. You''ll have lots of coordinate/collision/drawing order/perspective problems. Also, I always found starcraft a bit annoying since I cannot line up my buildings properly ( i.e. bunkers in a diagonal row).
One of the programmers of Age of Empires talked about their iso engine in the game development newsgroups once, and mentioned how glad he was they did it the mathematically correct way. Having ballistic object trajectories and a true 3D feel was natural and easy then.

Just something to think about...
BuschnicK


Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
blackfish.sourceforge.net