Ok here we go.... in the AD&D Goldbox games(Pool of Radiance, NWN, UA etc ) when walking around there is some sort of quasi 3d view used...what im interested in is how this accomplished, it seems relatively easy but for some reason it just totally evades me, if someone is familiar with those games and has a rough idea how this might be accomplished please post something so that I might be able to figure this out! Yes I know its outdated, yes I know I could go 3d etc etc but Im interested on how it was done for these games thanks! GriffonZ

they did what is known as isometric views. it''s a 2d view, but the tiles are skewed so that it LOOKS 3d. relatively simple. i believe they have a forum on isometric games here at gamedev...
---vas

Yah the battles were isometric I think but the actual moving in the overworld....
GriffonZ

quote: Original post by GriffonZ
Yah the battles were isometric I think but the actual moving in the overworld....
GriffonZ

The battles were flat out, no-frills, square 2D tiles. The wall tiles had a vaugely angled look to them, I suppose, but they were really just plain 2d tiles. (Notice than none of the characters could ever stand so they ''overlapped'' your view of a wall)

The walking around outside of combat was ''fake'' 3D, as vasagralem indicated. Notice that all of the walls were aligned on a grid at 90 degree angles in these games. This lets you get away with drawing 2D sprites scaled up or down for dead ahead walls, and precalculated rotations for the walls along the sides of your view. Factor in that you could only face in four directions, and it gets pretty likely that they precalculated just about everything.

Those were the kind of processor saving tricks you needed to get stuff to run on a 286. Hopefully we''ve grown out of them by now.