Isometric

[WILL]

Hi guys, I've been following this thread for a bit now and I have a question related to the topic.

How would you include instructions on how to add a multiple levels into your isometric maps?

I am currious mostly about displaying layers and handling them in the map. I've seen single level maps discussed, but the information has not gone into this area yet. ie. How this could be done in the game 'X-Com'.

[TheLion]

I wrote a small rectangular map engine once with multiple layers, basically what I did was creating 3 map-arrays that had the same size and just draw the map 3 times in the correct order using transparency, so say you would want to draw some dirt on the grass you would put a grass tile on the map in array 1 and the dirt tile on the same position as the grass tile, only in array 2, this way the grass is drawn first, then the dirt tile is drawn over it...

You could however treat the some layers as sprites, meaning that you would simply have a list of map-objects that come with the map, so for example you want a grass tile with a tree on top of it, in this case the multilayer method described above isn't efficient since it could cause collision detection problems, in this case you could put the grass tiles in an arra and threat the tree as a sprite and just provide it with an X, Y and a Z value, the Z value indicates the layer it should be drawn at. With a tree and grass this is easy, you would for example say that the tree is in layer 2 (Z=2) and the grass will be the background (layer1). It becomes a hell of a lot more interesting with walls a unit or something could stand on, or a tree that is on some sort of flower bed, by using the first technique (the 3 arrays) you are limited to the number of arrays as your layers, by using sprites your have endless possibilities... A mixture of both could also be quite powerfull, you could for example draw dirt and a sky of clouds using the array method and trees and animals etc as sprites...

[WILL]

Not quite what I was going for Lion. But an interesting approach to layered isometric tiles.

What I was actaully more interested in was lets say you have a multi-story building? And you want to draw floor 1, 2, 3, etc.... something along these lines. You're litterally stacking each floor or 'level' one on top of each other.

[cairnswm]

Haven't got around to doing my tutorial yet

On the subject of floors of a building etc I saw a nice discussion on line of site that uses rooms. The character would be in a room and the room would have an ID. All tiles of that ID get drawn and no other tiles. This solves the problem of rooms quite nicely.

[WILL]

Hmm... I haven't thought of rooms till you brought that up. Nice.

Mind you you may want to not let them see the bad guy hiding in the corner unless your character turns to see him. So maybe if you use your idea mixed with some sort of 'line of sight' arch that the character is facing. Then again, how do you take this into account when you're outside? But the idea would work great for a simple RPG or a simple floor/room based squad game.

[cairnswm]

Outside all has one ID. Then with your idea of Line of Sight you just show those squares that can be seen and have the same ID.