Hi, I''ve recently started an isometric game (I want it Turn based kind of like Xcom, I currently have implemented overlapping tiles(Based on the article posted on this site a few weeks ago), i also have what i call layers, which means i can do houses with multiple floors. But the thing that bugs me the most is the terrain elevation(making small hills for example), any ideas on how i could implement this? Here''s the ideas i''ve come up with so far 1) Displaying my tile by offseting Y to the height of the tile and filling up the sides with a side picture, This is what im currently doing, you can see a screenshot here : http://pages.infinit.net/somilth/test/Image1.jpg needless to say, the effect is not very good 2) I could do a mountain tile by tile (ie all possible combinason of heights surrounding a tile) but with my tile overlapping habilities it would be hell to draw all these tiles and i could never support more that 1 elevation per tile (ie: all hills elevating at the same degree)I think that''s how the 1st XCom worked. 3) The idea i''d like very much to implement but lack the knowledge to do it : Taking my tile(With the overlapping stuff on it, ice on the edge of grass, sand on the edge of water etc...) and somehow make it a texture to go over a "bump" on my map.. Any other ideas? If not, any tutorials on how to implement #3 ? Thank you Somilth

I''ve never tried to implement this before and thus don''t know exactly how. But here goes if you are using DirectX or OpenGL you could give your terrain elevations (via a height map included in any map file) and get Direct3d or OpenGL to render it using your height offsets (make all the height maps into four vertex primitives.

I think this could solve your problem quite effectively depending on how much processor time you want to devote to it.

3 is really easy to implement if you use Direct3D (or OpenGL) to handle the rendering/texturing... I submitted an article to GameDev this afternoon explaining how to do just that. Hopefully, it will be posted soon!

Thanks for your quick replies, I am actually using a portable game api(www.clanlib.org) because I''d like to easilly support both windows and linux platform but I think there are hooks to use opengl in it, I''ll have to look at that, I hope they''ll post your article soon! (If you don''t mind you could still email it to me? simon_v@videotron.ca )

Somilth

A question with regard to this message..

Has anyone ever implemented software rendered voxels as landscape in isometric games? Is this doable? What about rendering voxel landscapes upon map creation and storing the data as a bitmap. Anyone done this?

Never tried it, but it sounds like a really interesting area to explore. The big problem with voxels has always been lack of small details (Outcast''s designers, for example, state that their engine can''t model anything smaller than 16 cm. Delta Force gets around this somewhat by also having polygon rendering - but it still looks chunky). If there is a way around this - maybe a clever voxel texturing routine (I''ve seen these mentioned - I''ve yet to see one thats overly fast), it could be really impressive.

The only problem I see with prerendering voxels as tiles is.... you lose the advantages of voxels in the final output - its no more dynamic/rolling than any other texture, and you''d have introduced problems relating to sprite location *on* a tile. If a character goes into one of those neat valleys you can create with voxel rendering, you have to remember not to draw his feet if they should be obscured!

Check out the Outcast designers notes on their voxel engine:
http://www.appeal.be/products/page1/Outcast_GDC/outcast_gdc_1.htm