Game Development Community

TGB Isometric Add-On Pack - Part 2

by Neo Binedell · 06/12/2006 (10:31 am) · 28 comments

www.neoji.co.za/neo/gg/logo50x50bc.gif

- TGB Isometric Add-On Pack -


Continued from my previous plan:

Editor is coming along nicely, integrates seamlessly with TGB editors and current user project,
simply add the editor dir to the games dir and add -mod nxisoedit to the command line. Voila.

Start a project, press F9 and add any image maps you need, press F8 (or whatever you want to map it to) to switch back and edit your map and create/edit map elements. I've added a bunch of custom GUI controls to handle things like displaying dynamic lists/grids of all image maps or elements, etc, so theyre really fast.

Reworked the engine to use cell sectors which allows quick culling and broad phase search bins.
Sectors also allow doing mega-tiles and using one quad with texture transforms to tile and entire sector instead of blitting a ton of quads that use the same texture.

Source files number around 80 already so I think I'm going to have to start calling it the nxIso Builder instead of an Add-on ;p
No TGB source was touched, all custom code so integration will be really easy: add and compile.

Multi cell tiles are in and working like a charm.

Will post more later, but here's a screenie of the editor to keep the faith:

www.neoji.co.za/neo/gg/nxiso/isoed0.png

More later.

Neo Binedell
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#21
06/13/2006 (9:48 am)
I'm likely to purchase this. Beautiful work.
#22
06/13/2006 (9:53 am)
Oh, but I do have a question. I do have one game that uses the following camera angle: http://www.humanahaba.com/t2d/preview01.png

I'm having difficulties with making objects that are lower than the character show in front of the character, and objects at the same height/above showing behind. Would your add-on be able to address this? Or would it have to be at the angle I've seen in your screenshots?
#23
06/13/2006 (11:52 am)
Your implementation does bounds checks in 2D screen space and will therefore have those problems as there is not enough information to always choose the correct order. There are many approaches to
solve this one of which involves using the bottom coordinates of the sprites as points to compare, etc. so
that larger objects still compare correctly with small objects.

In the iso engine all elements on the map exist in a 3D space so objects further away will draw before closer objects and will thus be hidden by them.

I take it by the angle you mean the walls going diagonally and not straight up the screen Y axis?
That's what isometric means actually so yes it would have to be at the angle you see in the screenshots.

~neo
#24
06/13/2006 (9:48 pm)
A question, what about particle systems? How are particles handled in terms of draw order?
#25
06/13/2006 (11:02 pm)
The only thing deriving from t2dSceneObject is the map wrapper class and I've
created custom classes for all map elements as I wanted them as lightweight as
they could be, control when they get rendered and updated, etc, and not pollute
the scenegraph with objects that would not get rendered by it.

For integrating scene object derived classes like the particle system and 3D shapes
I have proxy map objects that control when and where to render the attached scene
object, etc.

Particle systems can be attached to any map element and will render when that element
renders at the same zorder. Particles being 2D only will render in their entirety at that
zorder for now until I get back to working on that. I am playing with different ideas for clipping/colliding them against the map elements but for the moment they are just 2D billboards.

I might just write a custom particle manager if needed.

~neo
#26
06/13/2006 (11:50 pm)
t2.5d sounds good,

don't follow the white rabbit...stay home and keep coding this deity to rpg'rs everywhere...

anthony
#27
06/14/2006 (10:14 am)
Posted an update here

~neo
#28
06/20/2006 (8:38 am)
Oooo! I want it.
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