4E4 Contest Entry - unnamed

[Traveler]

Because things tend to be slowing down again here at PGD, I thought I'd shed some light on that secret project of mine. (oh and to show off a bit against cairnswms project, perhaps that'll get his gear back on track again )

As you may have read on my website, the main thing I'm now working on is the isometric engine.
So far that alone has been quite challanging as I have never done any real isometric projects. Well, apart from the isocanvas demo that is, but that was only a conversion to DelphiX (btw did you know its being further developed in Omega, by czar?).

Anyway here's a screenshot of the project so far:

What you see here is a single tree, with randomly placed tiles on it. There also a red selection square, currently hovering over tile 58.

Current item on the todo list are the inhabitants. At the moment I don't have any definite sprites, so I use dummies instead. I can tell you its not an easy task, making them move within the boundaries of the map, checking for obstacles and fixing the order of drawing (ie make a sprite correctly move behind or in front of the tree, depending on its position). And I haven't even thought about pathfinding yet :-)

About the rest of game: I don't really want to tell that much about it yet, but suffice to say the of the four elements, I'll be using zombies and a robot, where the player will control the latter. Furthermore, the whole game takes place in a small town. Objectives or missions are still being thought out, as they will heavily depend on the state of the game mid september.

Ok, enough for now. Let me know what you think about it!

[cairnswm]

Cool!

And btw - you're on - As soon as work calms down (I'm tired of 12 hour days now) I'll put a lot of effort into my RTS again

I have done the diamond shape isometric maps before and cannot find a reason to do them in preference to a tilebased isometric approach which is in the long term a lot easier to code, understand and to do pathfinding for. Think carefully about your reasons for doing it in diamond shape.

For sprites use Reiners sprites until you have your own. They work nicely and have enough animations to look good. He doesn't have any Robots though. - for my RTS I have someone doing sprites for Robots and the rest of the units will be Reiners tile sets. (He does have zombies)

[czar]

How is diamond based different from tile based isometric? Are they not one and the same? Just a square area drawn as if you are standing higher up and to one side.

I loved isometric games especially UFO enemy unknown.

I still want to do Rebelstar in isometric. One day.

[WILL]

UFO rocks!

I think they mean hexigonal tiles...

[cairnswm]

Diamond based isometric is like the picture above. (Travellers 4E4 entry)
Tile based is what I refer to when its basically square tiles placed next to one another. (See previous discussion on Starcraft somewhere on this site). - (My 4E4 entry uses this display as does Run-A-War)

Typically they both store data the same way (An array based map maybe) but the way they transform the tiles to display the information is different. Tile based just displays in Z order top to bottom. Diamond based does the same basically from a NW direction toward SE - to me this just makes life difficult.

Pathfinding is easier because if using smaller than tile squares for pathfinding its easier to debug by showing information on the screen - otherwaise once again you need to do the transformations to just show debug info.

[WILL]

Ah ok... I remember this discussion from before. I often wondered how the buildings were built onto the map via squares on the map.

But then again, the map editor treated the maps like 'true' isometric tiles. It's rather interesting how that was done.

[Traveler]

Think carefully about your reasons for doing it in diamond shape.

I have. And you're right about the difficulties. However I find them a fun thing to solve and once they're solved its quite satisfying.
I tend not to look too much ahead as there are enough difficulties to make me stop the entire project and go back to WoW instead. No, this time I'm doing this one step at the time

[Traveler]

Last few days I've been working on the body for the zombie model.
There's still lots of parts that need improvement, but here's a wip version.


I'm having a bit of trouble getting it to look like a typical zombie. Of course the current pose isn't much helpfull, and perhaps the clothes are still too clean. I am in any case not going for the kind that has bodyparts ripped off or anything like that (like what you see in the movies).

Anyways, if you might have some pointers, I'd be grateful

[Sly]

The purple hair is a problem for me. I would imagine zombies to have not much hair, and the hair they do have would be thin, stringy and greyish.

That's one fit zombie with muscles. Those tight abs would be impressive on a living person, let alone someone risen from the dead.

Definitely more dirt and tears in the clothing.

[overchord]

Traveler - that is a really nice WIP!!! Good stuff indeed.

Although ripped clothes might help on the "zombiness" of the character I would have to go for the skin-tone. Currently the skintone looks rather....healthy, whereas in a zombie I would usually imagine some whitish/grey/blueish skin instead.
I also agree that the purple hair doesn't really do it for a zombie :lol:

But looking forward to see where this is going - great potential!