Starcraft

[Sly]

I installed the Starcraft just last night and looked at the editor... The little placement box is in the shape of a diamond.... Now i thought only ISO games did this?

That is just another part of the isometric illusion. Turn on the grid (in the menus somewhere) and you will see the tiles better.

Starcraft is an amazing example of how through ingenious artwork and some design rules you can fool almost everyone into thinking you have an isometric RTS when it's just using 32x32 square tiles with no overlapping terrain. Diablo II used the same approach. Notice how you can walk up and down stairs, but really you are walking straight and level? The graphics make you think you are going up and down, but really you are staying on the one plane for the entire game. Smart buggers at Blizzard.

[xGTx]

Well I need to figure out how to do this! Awsome system and I don't want to mess with ISO

[Sly]

It's all in the graphics for the tiles. Really study the editor with the grid turned on to see how they make the tiles fit together. Also note the blending tiles to change from sand to grass, or rock to dirt.

As for height, note that while playing the game you can never go behind any terrain. This means that the entire game is played on the one horizontal plane. It's the graphics that fools you into thinking that your units are actually on the top of that cliff. There may be some flags on those tiles to say the unit is higher than the one on the ground below it to give the higher unit an advantage in battle (elevated position = better position), but graphically it is all one plane.

[Traveler]

I've seen this topic around in quite a few forums. Might be a worthy subject for a tutorial. :roll:

[Harry Hunt]

Starcraft is an amazing example of how through ingenious artwork and some design rules you can fool almost everyone into thinking you have an isometric RTS when it's just using 32x32 square tiles with no overlapping terrain. Diablo II used the same approach. Notice how you can walk up and down stairs, but really you are walking straight and level? The graphics make you think you are going up and down, but really you are staying on the one plane for the entire game. Smart buggers at Blizzard.

That's really interesting (considering that Diablo II is one of my favorite games of all times). So are you saying it uses the same fake elevation as StarCraft, or are you also saying that it isn't really isometric?

[Sly]

Both. It is especially evident in some of the caves (episode two or three I think) where you "step" down a series of stairs, but you eventually come full circle and end up back where you started. So how did you get back to where you started if you only ever went down stairs? Because you never actually left the horizontal plane that your whole game is played on. This was not an intentional design on the part of Blizzard since the maps in Diablo II are all randomly generated. This was just a side-effect of the random map generation.

As for the square tiles, Blizzard once again faked the isometric view with cleverly rendered 32x32 square tile graphics. Take the teleporters for example. If you slowly move the mouse over them, you can see the area where the teleporter lights up is actually composed of square tiles. The "3D" view that you could enable simply used the 3D card to render the tiles slightly skewed towards the top centre of the screen. It was still a 2D game, but with skewed tiles.

[cairnswm]

Thanks Sly - everything you've said sort of validates what I have been able to work out from looking at Starcraft and trying to work out how it was done.

My next game - probably a simple Medieval RTS game will be using the same style of Tiles (Probably 64x48 tiles) that Starcraft and Run-A-War used. Just want to enable more multi character options for the game so that I can enable armies.

How does a game like start craft do Networking? This is something thats been bugging me a lot - I know how Age of Empires 1 does it (there is a detailed article on Gamasutra about it) but it doesn;t seem practicle for a one man band to do the same thing (its all based on a command system and each PC doing the movement of every unit) - In Run A War I just send the current character position, movement and starts along with a couple of event messages - then the other PC just resets the relevant information. I have tried this with more units and it seems to be very inefficient (I still need to try sending less data).

[Sly]

Networking for a RTS is a whole issue in itself. There have not been any articles published on network as it relates to Starcraft specifically, but the articles about the networking for AoE, or any other RTS, should be applicable to any RTS. That said, the networking component of any RTS, no matter how simple, is a very difficult issue that is a huge task.

[User137]

What comes to Diablo 2, it is truly isometric. What i have seen its graphics, they are diamond shaped not rectangles. But its graphics are not only tiles or diamonds, it uses lots of different shaped and sized even very large transparent sprites. Though i am not sure how collisions work with D2 :?:

SC and Diablo both are isometric games. D2 has even option render it with 3D perspective. Both have units rendered from certain angle not straight top in any case.

What comes to flying units, only way to tell they are flying is their shadow that is placed under them. What's really interesting about it, is that units don't move up when they go higher only shadows move down A brilliant way to make unit selection and movement easy and effective.

Edit: SC is still isometric game no matter it is rendered with tiles...

[Sly]

What comes to Diablo 2, it is truly isometric. What i have seen its graphics, they are diamond shaped not rectangles. But its graphics are not only tiles or diamonds, it uses lots of different shaped and sized even very large transparent sprites. Though i am not sure how collisions work with D2 :?:

Is it the actual tile sheets you have seen or just the in-game graphics?

SC and Diablo both are isometric games. D2 has even option render it with 3D perspective. Both have units rendered from certain angle not straight top in any case.

It's not 3D perspective though. It merely skews the tiles towards the top centre of the screen to give the illusion of 3D perspective. As the Diablo II post-mortem (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20...chaefer_01.htm) puts it, "quasi-3D".

Edit: SC is still isometric game no matter it is rendered with tiles...

I guess that's where we differ in opinion. To me, it's only truly isometric if it is rendered with isometric tiles. If it is rendered with square tiles but those tiles are made to look like isometric, it is not truly isometric.