TGB Isometric Add-On Pack - Part 4

- TGB Iso Builder -

Continued from my previous blog post

Well I've been hanging out with my new baby girl after some late nights doing 3 overlapping projects and finally got some time to get back into the swing of things with the Iso Builder.

A thought struck me recently that an iso engine is at its core view dependent and so instead of having the engine figure out what should be drawn when I realized that users did not expect the engine to know.

What I needed to do is give the user the power to specify exactly how things should be ordered instead.

So I once again rewrote the map structure to be more intuitive for users and now tiles can be referenced by map column, row and layer. All that layer is there for is to statically order tiles intra-cell, period. A layer does not have implicit elevation, that is set separately. This speeds up render ordering immensely and is also more intuitive to work with, e.g:

Quote:
%map.setTile( 0, 0, 0, "grass" );

%map.stackTile( 0, 0, "tree" );

Another thing I am busy with is micro-collision for each cell. Each map cell is sub divided into 5x5 sub cells which can be set as blocking, etc and is a lot faster to check against that doing ray/box intersections, etc.
Each tile can have its own grid as well which is overlaid onto the cells they cover. This allows us to assign blocking per tile as well as directly onto the map. Of course this is layered as well so you can have things like bridges which allow movement both underneath and over.

Of course then I rewrote the rendering pipeline as well and added some of the features I was yacking about before, e.g. occluder masking (i.e. static objects fade so we can see dynamic objects that are occluded by them):



At the moment I am busy getting the editor working again with all the new changes as well as adding tools to make creating and editing world boxes, image offsets, frame aligning, etc for the visuals.

( I also figured out a way to auto-create world boxes from the images supplied which are easily editable using sliders)

Well I'll get back to work and hopefully update more often...