Does anybody have any Idea how this is done in code? I''ve offered to buy a copy of Diablo''s source code but they told me that they don''t release their source code. It sounds like an interesting project. I would really like to try something like this once I become good enough of a programmer, which may be a while.

"Remember, I'm the monkey, and you're the cheese grater. So no fooling around."
-Grand Theft Auto, London

You really have enough money to buy the source to Diablo?? You must be rich. Anyways, it''s just your everyday isometric engine, except I believe they incorporate scripting. Check out the articles on gamedev.net and flipcode.com, then you can see what you need to do.

Saruman, as I said both are great games and the Infinity Engine isn't a bad engine its just a difference in design philosophy. Bioware thinks that they can do a better looking game with prerendered backgrounds and there is no arguement. Their games look great. However, just considering their isometric engine it is of the more simple variety. I think Diablo is a great example that you can make a tile based game look great and retain some of the art reuse and dynamic environment construction that you lose with big bitmap scroller like Infinity. Plus, in my humble opinion, the bit bitmap scrollers don't really lend themselves all to a more interactive environment. While I enjoyed Baldurs's Gate a great deal I often got the feeling I was just walking on a pretty picture as opposed to through a tavern or through the woods.

What I trying to point out here, is not that the engine is overall bad, but that I notice people saying that "Wow Baldur's Gate looks great, I wanna code that," when in reality the code has very little to do with how good that game looks. Its all art. My thoughts :-).

Just as a last thought, if you do want go Bioware's route I hope you have lots of artists! They drew, literally, several thousand of those rendered screens for the Baldur's Gate.

Edited by - Sieggy on 3/7/00 7:15:55 AM

Diablo II will feature D3D? This seems odd, since all I''ve heard is that people with 3DFX cards will be able to run the game hardware accelerated (= Glide), otherwise, why would Blizzard only use Glide for lights and f/x and not D3D?

All I know about Diablo I is that it''s 2D tiles in a 8bit palettized mode.

============================
Daniel Netz, Sentinel Design

"I'm not stupid, I'm from Sweden" - Unknown

Just to clear some things up about Diablo ][:
(Taken from http://www.blizzard.com/diablo2/)

Experience additional visual enhancements with special 3Dfx features:
improved transparency effects

colored lighting
smoother shadowing and transitions between light and dark areas
atmospheric effects
faster frame rate

But on the other hand on another page on there web they say:

- While a 256-color SVGA video card is the minimum video requirement for Diablo II, Diablo II is capable of displaying a higher color depth when running with Direct3D or a Glide-capable video card.

What I gather from everyone''s post is that Diablo II will use a normal 2d isometric tile engine and be enhanced should the user have a glide-compatible card. Well, I''ve never ever even made an isometric engine and don''t know what goes into making one. Should anyone have a URL to a site with information on how to make one (in detail), please post it up. Thanks in advance!

"Remember, I'm the monkey, and you're the cheese grater. So no fooling around."
-Grand Theft Auto, London

If you really want to figure out how Diablo is put together,
find a good Diablo mod site and find the formats used for the different graphics and such. This should give some insight into how the game is coded. I''ve done this with WarCraft II (and StarCraft, which uses the same graphic format) and it''s been very useful in understanding what types of things go into making a professional product.

Psychoprog: Try the Isometric section of gamedev (this site), under programming.... there is more than enough information between TANSTAAFL and Jim Adams' articles to get you going with a basic isometric engine. If you want existing code to look at, try looking for Isometrix.

Diablo II, IIRC, uses glide to accelerate some special effects if its available. I read somewhere that the Infinity engine has been extended to use 3D cards for special effects, too.

Edited by - Bracket on 3/7/00 4:46:37 PM

Sieggy: Oh, I totally agree with what you said earlier, I was just pointing our that the infinity engine is not only graphics. Bitmapped backgrounds take "a million artists a million days" to get a game completed why diablo''s approach is more efficient for the individual developer, so I do agree there also. What I was pointing out was the scripting engine, because even though the graphics in BG were so good, the game would have sank without the scripting engine. It allowed good enough AI for a game of it''s time, and scripting of NPCs. Without that scripting engine the game would have taken an extra year or two to hard code. Just wanted to point that out, engines aren''t all just graphics remember.


[Edited by - Saruman on December 30, 2006 10:12:23 PM]

I totally agree Saruman. I imagine we can all think of examples of games that sacrificed all their other aspects just to have a graphics engine. There''s much more to a game than that.