Isometric Tile Terrain?

[Veryevil]

Hi, i was wondering if there is any way to control the 4 corners of a tile to create angled tiles based on a height array with a height for each corner?

e.g.

height [1,1,2,2]

that would make the x's different heights

//in iso view not flat canot ascii draw it

x----x would be 1,1
|ssss| //s spacer to make it look right
|ssss|
x----x would be 2,2 so higher

and could this be made to curve the tiles to give a really cool 3d look.

cheers

[SaphuA]

Hey,
It is very possible, and I made a little land-creation engine with it. Although I lost the .fla I did manage to get the an older .swf of the engine, wich I hope inspires you.

The idea was this:
Each tile will have a framelabel according to the height of it's corners. So each label will have a length of 4 and will look like this: 0001, 0010, 0000, 1110 etc.

Then I placed the first tile on the upper left corner of the map and made it stop at a random frame.

The next tile will have the same height on his left side, as the first tile has on his right side. The other 2 corners (right of the new tile) will be picked at random. This will finaly build the whole 'map'.

Although, I had to use some tricky ways to go around this, because you can't get values from framelabels etc.

SaphuA

PS: .swf removed. I've posted the .fla a few posts below.
PPS: It's better to see the technique at a mapsize of 2-4

[rabbitkiller]

2SaphuA: good stuff!

[Veryevil]

Thats brill thanks. its given me a few ideas

dont suppose it can be done dynaically tho?

[SaphuA]

Rabbitkiller:
Thanks

Veryevil:
Thanks What do you mean with dynamical?

Edit: A friend of mine still had an old fla that I gave him a while ago. It is unfortunatly not a very optimised version.

The reason each framelabel starts with an f, is because Flash can't handle framelabels starting with numbers. I've commented the key-parts of the code, and I hope it's understandable.

Hope someone is able to use it

SaphuA

PS: It's MX

[Veryevil]

Hi cheers

By dynamically i meant have just an ordernary flat tile in the mc and the move the points of it with actionscript so for each different tile i dont need loads of frames?

im just wonderin cos flash has all this drawin stuff in it now and if you could do stuff like that.

[SaphuA]

Aha...
Well, I asume you're not just having simple vector graphic's so creating these tiles with the drawing API would be pretty difficult. I also don't think there's an easy way (if there even is a way ) to distort images like that.

What you could do is put all different types of land (so with all the curves and stuff) into 1 MC, and then place it under an objects MC. This way your land can still be generated at random, but a tree will always stay on it's position. You should be carefull with the idea that trees can grow with an angle when standing on an angled hill, I think it's just a matter of illusion to fix this

SaphuA

[token 3]

SaphuA
here's a rebuild or your swf
(hope you don't mind me posting it here)

[SaphuA]

Originally posted by token 3
SaphuA
here's a rebuild or your swf
(hope you don't mind me posting it here)

Hehe m8.. check a few posts above you

Thanks for the effort though

[Veryevil]

Oh well didnt think so

oh if you were wonderin (Plug plug) heres what im working on

3disotile

what you think

[jtnw_tmp]

Dynamic distortion of the tiles is very possible... Demo.

jtnw

[Veryevil]

HOW???????

[jtnw_tmp]

Read this tutorial by ericlin. Basically, I just split the tiles up into 4 triangles, which can make any shape.

jtnw

[Xploder]

wow, thats amazing the method of using triangles is really efficient, in 3DsMax they use triangles to model everything that comes to their mind. So would you be able to put a texture map on that and distort it. Like the textures you'd use for any 3D program, which are always distorted, and you need to draw an unwrapped image.

Really good stuff. Gotta get to trying this out.

[jtnw_tmp]

Xploder, if you're talking about my engine and if it can handle textures, then yes it can. Right now they're just simple vector boxes since bitmaps would slow it down quite a bit. That's kind of the reason why I stopped working on it; it's too slow. However, Since everything is based on a grid, there's many ways to optimize it with tricks, I just haven't found them all yet.

jtnw