I can see what your artist means.

Without shadows it's pretty hard to tell at which z-level your red box is currently at, since it could be at the high front, or low back.

With shadows it should be much clearer though

Yeah as iltis says, its a little tricky to work out where the the red box is in relation to the current z-level.  As well as shadows, other suggestions would be 

1) Keep the z selection with the current z-level. Or is that confusing, or limits your actions?

2) Maybe show opaque grey selection boxes above/under the red box to show how many z-levels you are away from the current level 

Good luck!

As others have said, currently, below ground doesn't look different from above ground with bare land. You can't see you're under ground level, and how far. If you have other tunnels, how can I see them, eg to connect, or to avoid connecting?

You may want to look at how rollercoaster tycoon handled under the ground levels.

Great.  Now I have the Gnomoria theme song running through my head.  Again.

Anyway, I would take a look at what they did in that game, see what they got right (most stuff) and what could be improved on (cursor control, more than cursor location).  Have the current selection anchor stick to the "surface" of the current view and follow the cursor as a view-cursor-taget projection -- the "surface" may be the top of the current Z-slice in cutaway mode.  Have the selection anchor glow around the edges of the square for feedback.

I don't think people today have a lower IQ or are generally more incapable of grasping ideas than folks of years gone by.  Why do you think they'd be confused by an isometric view?  Heck, if there's a sustainable market for Dwarf Fortress and its UI (and there apparently is; I know I've gratefully sent them my money), you may want to revise your judgement of humanity.

8 hours ago, Learn2develop said:

You did a pretty good job of rendering the graphics for your game, how long have you been in game development? To answer your question though, I don't believe that it should be too confusing for the gamers of the newer generation. Especially not a true gamer. 

Hi Learn2develop, this is the first major game I've ever made, actually. Although I've dabbled in game development for about five of the nine years I've actually been programming. This game has been in development for about two years, but as I stated in the original question I recently switched graphics rendering libraries and switched from orthogonal 2D rendering to isometric. I actually made the switch about 5 days ago, and what you're seeing is about three or four days of real work on the graphics. That's also why I don't have a UI in place: since I switched rendering engines I had to re-do all that too. But yeah, I've finished the colonist/minion/soldier AI, world generation, mining resources and cutting down trees, hauling behaviors for stockpiles. All I need to do now (and I'm guessing it's going to take me another year, what with college and all) is finish the construction AI (both for simple walls and workshops/generators/big building units), tech tree and fighting AI. So right now I'm about 60-70% done. I plan to make this game multiplayer but that's more of something I'm going to work on in tandem with a Kickstarter.

8 hours ago, Iltis said:

I can see what your artist means.

 

Without shadows it's pretty hard to tell at which z-level your red box is currently at, since it could be at the high front, or low back.

With shadows it should be much clearer though

Do you think just dimming lower levels could work too? I could do shadows, in fact I kind of plan on it, but right now I'm barely getting 60fps as it is and it might make the rendering truly slow to od shadows.

8 hours ago, nicster said:

 

Yeah as iltis says, its a little tricky to work out where the the red box is in relation to the current z-level.  As well as shadows, other suggestions would be 

1) Keep the z selection with the current z-level. Or is that confusing, or limits your actions?

2) Maybe show opaque grey selection boxes above/under the red box to show how many z-levels you are away from the current level 

Good luck!

2

Actually it is limited to your current Z-level, but I guess your confusion proves your point In any case, number 2 is actually a really good idea! I should try that. It might help a LOT with clarity. I could show opaque grey selection boxes under the cursor box to show how many z-levels you are away from the floor/ bottom level.

4 hours ago, Bregma said:

Great.  Now I have the Gnomoria theme song running through my head.  Again.

Anyway, I would take a look at what they did in that game, see what they got right (most stuff) and what could be improved on (cursor control, more than cursor location).  Have the current selection anchor stick to the "surface" of the current view and follow the cursor as a view-cursor-taget projection -- the "surface" may be the top of the current Z-slice in cutaway mode.  Have the selection anchor glow around the edges of the square for feedback.

I don't think people today have a lower IQ or are generally more incapable of grasping ideas than folks of years gone by.  Why do you think they'd be confused by an isometric view?  Heck, if there's a sustainable market for Dwarf Fortress and its UI (and there apparently is; I know I've gratefully sent them my money), you may want to revise your judgement of humanity.

Hey Bregma, to be honest, I was pretty confident that people would be able to figure out the graphics, my only issue was if I could make it so that there wasn't much to figure out, ie how to improve on games like Gnomoria. My artist (who mostly plays FPS games, I'm a Dwarf Fortress megafan) wasn't so sure.

It's for sure more rare approach to creating the game, but the idea is promising.

It's quite possible to use isometric view for a wide pool of ideas. I love how you've rendered the terrain. I've seen semi 3D MMORPGs like this.

It does the job well, i've had an idea like this a while ago, to make a "4D" game map like this with the multi dimensional matrix, when you pass certain door at XYZ, certain world parts become visible and others invisible. 

Now that i think about it, how much harder would be to transform chunky maps into co-joined polygons? To allow various combinations of the landscape. 

Kenlog,

Thanks for the compliment! The graphics were actually rendered out by my artist so its at least 60% his baby.

I don't know how much harder it would be, tbh. I don't have a lot of 3D programming experience, but I would assume it wouldn't be very hard at all, and it's certainly an interesting idea! You should run with it! The only possible issue is blending the various textures for the land, and it might be more efficient just to use marching cubes, but that's just a guess.

I've implemented the stacked cursor (I forget who's suggestion that was) and fixed the solider's rendering. I also added a few biomes and things. Here are some updated screenshots.

CHANGELOG:

1. Added desert biome (only shows up on worlds close to their sun and therefore with little water and a lower sea level)

2. Snow biome (on very high peaks and stuff)

3. Beach plants

4. More variety in forests

Keep in mind that these biomes are compressed and not particularly realistic in the interest of making the game interesting.

At part of the UI have the cursor X,Y,Z info displayed.  If the user ever needs to confirm where their cursor is, it is just a glance away.  Or tie it to a (maps?) key or right mouse click.