Quote Originally Posted by Andreaz
And finally the status of the Tile engine is as follows; more or less the thing that is done so far is the rendering and layer handling, and only for normal rectangular grids, havn't really came up with a good way of handling isometric grids and collisions and such... It's easy to design a tile engine for a specific game, alot more troublesome to make one dynamic enough to support rpg's platforms and isometric games at once
Andreaz, you might want to take a look at how I handled this in GIE (full source and exe at: http://www.eonclash.com/ViewProduct.php?ProductID=15)
Basically I provide for an X and Y offset and an X odd offset that is added to the tile base position. This allows you to edit and preview square, iso, and hex tiles easily within GIE. Granted this only gets you stagger maps for ISO and Hex, but you can also add a rendering flag that states how the step should occur.

Its been a long time since I played with GIE, but I think I remember enough of the code to explain it if it doesn't make any sense. The down side is that its a Delphi application and not an FPC application