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[hooligan2001]

Does anyone know of any good site where i can read up and research different ways of making isometric tile based games, i mainly looking for technotes and algorithims. Also different abilities for isometric tile based games .

Much appretiated

[Ed Mack]

What kind of things are you interested in? I could try bouncing ideas off you, and I'm sure some of the other iso nuts here would too.

[hooligan2001]

What im looking for is , how height tiles and slopes work.

just say i have a floor tile, step tile and a wall tile.
i want to increase the _x of the avatar depending on the height of the tile.

Also any sites on gravity and jumping in isometric worlds

stuff like that just techniques and ways to accomplish the best result.

[hooligan2001]

Thanks token and Ed

if theirs any more info people can provide it would be much appreciated

[hooligan2001]

Quick question: Is their any real proportions to isometric tiles ?

if so does any one know what it is

[Ed Mack]

Proportion:

W:H = 2:1

For height related things, I tend to have set heights for each tile (each image, not tile on map). And then lookup those when moving the character, and find the difference in heights from the place he's moving to and moving from, and divide that by the number of steps he will take to get from one tile to another, and add/subtract height accordingly. Sort of like a mathmatical tween

[hooligan2001]

I get ya , I was reading up on multilayered Maps
one array for graphics and the other for height

for the graphics array looks like this

map = [[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
       [1,2,2,2,2,2,0,2,1],
       [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1],
       [1,2,0,2,0,2,0,2,0],
       [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]];

and the height map looks like this

0 = floor 1 = wall 2 = high wall

height = [[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [0,3,2,3,2,3,0,3,0],
          [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [0,2,0,2,0,3,0,3,0],
          [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]];

Hey ed do u have any examples of their height tweening on iso maps ?

[yellowman]

This is a pretty nice overview:
http://www.compuphase.com/axometr.htm

/klas

[Ed Mack]

Theres some iso stuff at http://www.gamedev.net

[hooligan2001]

token 3 : - thanks heaps for the fla ,

yellowman : - that site has some pretty cool techniques

Ed Mack : - thanks for the url

all this stuff is helping heaps ill give it a go and get back to you guys with any suggestions and help

Thanks Agian

[octothorp]

I've got a project I'm not doing anything with at the moment that deals with isometric display. I thought of doing a sim-city type game with it, or possibly mini-golf. Basically, it takes some map data stored in XML format and displays it as an isometric map.

You can view the rendered map at :

http://www.metafora.ca/iso/iso1nwo.swf

(warning, it takes a freakin' long time to render as the entire map is created with the drawing API and I haven't got around to building a pre-loader, so when you get a message that says that the script is taking a long time to run, just ignore it. It'll come up eventually--the error message usually comes up twice for me when I'm loading.)

And the corresponding XML at:
http://www.metafora.ca/iso/xmldata/gamedata.xml

(the area nodes define blocks of land to elevate, the point nodes define single points to elevate, the sea-level node defines the height of the sea, and the spring node defines the starting point of a stream (only the starting point is defined, the stream figures out where to go by finding a route downhill)).

My XML file defines elevation points on the grid, either individually or by areas. For each square, a flash function determines the North, South, East and West elevation heights, and then draws a square connecting those four points:

lineto(myx-(xscale/2), myy+(yscale/2)-W);
lineto(myx, myy+(yscale)-S);
lineto(myx+(xscale/2), myy+(yscale/2)-E);
lineto(myx, myy-N);

...where
myx = starting x-coordinate
myy = starting y-coordinate
xscale = width of an isometric square
yscale = height of an isometric square (should always be 1:2 to xscale for true isometric)
and N, S, E, W, are the elevation levels of each corner.


If you're interested, I can post the whole FLA. It's not much good for adventure games the way it's written now, as there's a crap-load of redundent processing: every line is essentially drawn twice, as it's drawn by both bordering squares. Add the sea level-rendering (which was a nightmare and still only kinda-works), and this project was just taking way to much math for my journalism-major mind.

I could have saved a lot of time by going with traditional isometric display where changes in terrain are always the same height


#

[Ed Mack]

I have the same sort of thing running on http://www.edmack.com, it loads a map from http://ed.gamegeared.com/map1.xml

[Ed Mack]

Oh, I just noticed the post up a bit mentioned drawing API and iso... I had a go at this a long time ago, it's random

http://ed.gamegeared.com/flash/terrain_gen.swf
http://ed.gamegeared.com/flash/terrain_gen.fla

And rotation of ISO:

http://ed.gamegeared.com/flash/iso_rot.swf
http://ed.gamegeared.com/flash/iso_rot.fla

[octothorp]

Hey Ed Mack;

both the samples you posted are fantastic. I'm definitely going to be going through your code for the ISO/drawing API one to see how you get all of that working so quickly. Maybe I'll give my own project another go. I had basically given up on it because it was getting way too processor intensive, but your examples seem to work super-quickly.

Thanks for sharing!

#

[Ed Mack]

Thank you very much! The DrawingAPI one works fast because there isn't all that much to it, with ISO being so simple (2:1 width:height) you don't need any complicated maths. If I added features to the fla it would probably bloat and get slow

[garfieldx]

Hi Ed,

I just saw your starting game on your website (http://www.edmack.com). I was really impressed about the concept and the smothness of this. So I was wondering if you have the fla-source for download somewhere on your tutorial-pages or if I can have a look at it?

I have to do some iso-world stuff till next weekend - I build an iso engine, but it doesn't work as smooth as your does by now.

Maybe you can also tell me, where (application) and how you create the map-tiles (elements) - especially such "complex" like the ramp (so they look that smooth)...

Many thanks in adv,

Garf

[Ed Mack]

I draw them all in flash, using the pen tool, and also just dragging the corners. Here's the source (there's lots of stuff in it, not all used. And, there is a slight bug regarding removing sprites):

http://ed.gamegeared.com/iso_edmack.zip

The zip is a newer version, with newer maps and stuff.

[garfieldx]

Wow! Thank you very much for your fast reply!
You helped me a lot. When I manage to do that project I'll show you the results...

Thanks,

Garf

[Ed Mack]

Download that file again, the bug is gone