Isometric tilemaps?

[Liazon]

Does anyone wish there were more games that used isometric tilemaps?

If so, what kind of features would you guys like in a tilemapper? My first concern right now is tile size.

[crzyrbl]

Does anyone wish there were more games that used isometric tilemaps?

Ya, that does sound cool. Has anyone already made a calc game thats isometric yet?

[threefingeredguy]

Does anyone wish there were more games that used isometric tilemaps?

Ya, that does sound cool. Has anyone already made a calc game thats isometric yet?

I think Cubez is isometric.

What about 16x12?

[tr1p1ea]

They are going to look strange if they are not square. I say 8x8 is just fine, in fact Joe even wrote an isometric tilemapper around 3 years ago iirc. Might be able to find the source somewhere.

[Liazon]

I forgot to mention. Since ppl started talking about tilemappers and all that, I suddenly got the urge to figure out a SMOOTHSCROLLING isometric tilemapper. I remember 3FG mentioned JoeP wrote one for an FF:Tactics game.

I'm just wondering if anybody would even be interested?

my main problem is that I'm not 100% how to do things like 1.) draw while the LCD is busy 2.) scroll tiles quickly 3.) other things in general

But I can say that theoretically, it is possible to pull off a smooth scroll isometric tilemapengine that is about half as fast as Jim e or Dwedit's mapper, assuming I use their code as a base for drawing and timings.

btw, I know one of Jim e's mappers scrolls all the tiles then does drawing. but do regular ones draw the map into a buffer bigger than the screen and then update the buffer as needed? cuz that's something a bit iffy about the regular coordinate system vs. an isometric coordinate system.

I guess I need to do some reading first

[tr1p1ea]

It seems that i voted incorrectly, i voted 8x8 but i really meant that from within isometric perspective. I guess having 8x8 tiles from an isometric pov would look a little funny, so 16x16 would be better. The actual tile on the screen from a square point of view would most likely be 16x8. Usually isometric tiles are twice as wide as they are high.

[kv83]

isometric is very hard to see in b/w. so greyscale is a must. smoothscrolling will become a little harder that way though. especially with all the calculating of what you can see and what not.

[threefingeredguy]

You can do simple isometric tilemapping if you have the ability to do transparent layers. Read the Square Isometric section here.

[Liazon]

got it covered. like I said before, I'm just a bit n00b when it comes to regular tilemappers, so I need to learn more about the scrolling and drawing parts.

edit:
wait, so is it more useful if the tiles aren't just flat? like in 3FG's link, the tiles can cover tiles above? because that I'm not sure I can do.

I can probably do a hexometric tilemapper though too using 8h x16w tiles.

[Liazon]

This is a standard 16x16 isometric tile. Now the thing about a tiles is that in order for perfect tessellation, the pink area of the tile must be the exact same shape as the empty space indicated by the dark green. This must hold true for all four quadrants/corners (8x8 subdivision) of the tile entry. That means freaky tiles like the one on the right can also tesselate "isometrically".


ok, so here's a possible way to give the mapper tile map data. it'd be harder on the user when it comes to using the tilemap for hit detection, but it might be easier just to give the mapper an x,y coordinate. white space is "empty" where there's no tiles.


ok, so here's probably what most programmer's want. just simply aligning the tilemap info into a diamond shape so the programmer can use it for hit detection along the isometric plane. more inputs are probably needed because a tile x,y coordinate is probably needed, and then which amount of scrolling would need to be indicated.

thoughts?