From your code, I assume you are using isometric tiles? While ease to visualize, it is simply inefficient.

I personally started out with isometric tiles (and isometric blitting) for my engine, but ultimately decided to blit square tiles from a square map and then simply transform isometric coordinates to the 2D square map, when reading map data for collision detection etc....

/NJ

/NJ

Niels, are you saying that the isometric look of your game is done through the artwork, and that the tiles you blit are square with no transparent clipping to make up for the 'diamond' isometric tiles? Can you give me a sample of some of your artwork, or a URL where I could see one or two of your tiles?

Square tile maps that look isometric aren't new. Starcraft does just that. All of it's graphics are squares that are drawn so that they look isometric.

------------------
Dino M. Gambone
http://www.xyphus.com/users/dino

Good judgement is gained through experience. Experience, however, is gained through bad judgement.

Sphet: Yes, that is exactly what I am saying... I'll post some screenshots on "some" site sometime soon. Right now the game is on hold due to lack of motivation (The multiplayer part is 90+% done, though, so I might do a multiplayer-only sharware release, who knows !!)...

/NJ

The screenshots are now at
http://home.worldonline.dk/~noshit

If you've got a slow connection, try:
http://home.worldonline.dk/~noshit/scrshots.html

(The first page takes ages to load, sorry)

/NJ

Hey, could ya send me the code for that too, looks good by the way!

benjones@hotmail.com

Niels
Could ya send me the code and explain how do ya do it?

benjones@hotmail.com

Yo, Niels. I saw your game and it looks amazing. I made an isometric engine and then changed to a rectangle tile engine since there easier to work with for an Real-time strategy game.

I noticed that in the screenshot the minimap and map is a diamond shape, and you said that use used a normal rectangle engine and just blted rectangle tiles with isometric drawing. How did you make the diamond map?

Also, if you used an normal rectangle tile engine wouldn't you be wasting alot of array space.
eg.
this is the array of the map -
1 = used tiles
0 = black(not used tiles)
{ 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0
0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0
}

This is if you used a "NORMAL" rectangle tile engine.
Did you blt the tiles in a special way?
Could you please tell me, if you did blt the tiles in a special way how???

Thanks alot,

email - datisme@notme.com
Da_KiD

DAPsycho:

Eh, how I do what exactly? The tile rendering makes little sense out of context, and no, I'm not going to distribute the full source, sorry... If what you are asking for is the actual mapping formulas, I'll try to post them tonight...

Da_Kid:

Yes, there's a certain waste of space, but all things considered, we are talking <1K here....

The only 2 special things about the tiling are these:

1) Odd rows are offset by half a tile to compensate for the differences in isometric/square mapping. (If I remember, I'll post a drawing of this on the site tonight).
2) There's an isometric "collision map" behind the square tile map.

/NJ

(What is it with you guys and the "Da"-word anyway? =) )...

Niels,

The screen shots look good. What is the screen resolution, bitdepth and average tile size you use? Also, the artwork looks nice - is it done in a 3d program, and if so, what sort of camera settings / angle are you using the maintain the isometrics. The 1-bit alpha-channel as collision detection works really well. Your scheme must be similiar to StarCraft, where you can't build things too close to overhangs since the ground tiles are all blitted with no transperency. Good job.