Question about isometrics

#21 Smaug, you are unbelievable, no doubt about it. I'd write up a lengthy response, but Matthew's done a much more eloquent job of that than my tired brain can muster right now.

I will add, however, that I personally don't typically throw the "code it yourself" card around very often. In this case, however, it seemed obvious from your choice of words that you considered the code changes fairly trivial. Hence, add it yourself, instead of pestering Melv with that condescending (imho) attitude. I'll pick out the quote Matthew pointed out as well.

Quote:I could write T2D

Once again, since it's so trivial, and you're obviously capable of writing an entire 2D engine, the addition of the simple isometrics capabilities should be no sweat at all.

edit: Also, you seem to regularly ignore the fact that T2D is still EA. You act as if Melv is ignoring isometrics entirely, when he's already stated very clearly, on numerous occasions, that work is being or will be done towards that end. It simply isn't as high on the priority list than the fundamentals, such as collision, physics bugs, etc.

To top it all off, the original point of this thread has been completely de-railed. >:(

#22

Quote:next, this is not a month project, this has been months and months of solid work by an ingenious coder (teamed with a great publishing company/game engine company)...

I didn't say I could write T2D in a week or something. I recognize that it has taken quite a bit of time to get T2D to where it is.

The point is that saying that you should "write some feature yourself" is ludicrous when the feature is something that should be provided by the engine.

When you're writing code based on an engine, and you run into a difficulty because of how an engine does things, there are 3 possible reasons for this "deficiency" (if it is indeed such):

1: The engine's design is wrong.
2: What you're wanting to do is in such the minority compared to more generally useful stuff that you can't expect a general-purpose engine to cover it.
3: What you've asked for is very close to existing functionality and working around the deficiency is trivial.

For example, I would like it if T2D allowed finer-granularity in terms of which objects get collision. It'd be nice if I could dynamically update whether or not a pair of objects should provoke a collision (in my case, so that a missile launched from a unit can damage with that unit, but only after it gets a distance away from the unit). However, I realize that this falls under both #2 and #3, so I just employ a simple workaround, and I'm happy. It's not something worth bothering the developer for, nor can I reasonably expect a positive response for said functionality.

Isomaps are a different animal. They don't fall under #2. And, while the implementation doesn't require touching lots of T2D code, it requires enough effort that #3 is out.

Quote:you can't get Unreal engine and then go say you want all these features, or a single major feature...

The Unreal engine (the current one, at any rate) is finished. Asking for major features of a finished product probably isn't likely to be listened to. T2D isn't finished yet; it's still EA. Indeed, one of the principle reasons behind having an EA is to get feedback on where the engine is lacking.

I imagine that, if you are a developer of note, and you go to 3DRealms and ask for some feature for the Unreal 3 engine, they will probably listen to you. They don't listen to us because we're not the people that they're making this engine for.

Quote:not hardly... the camera in T2D isn't "locked"... that would have to be the comarison...

The comparison, as I pointed out, is in genre, and which genre the change supports. I did say, after all, "Granted, such a change is far more trivial compared to implementing isomaps," thus noting the difference in the ease of implementation of the feature.

#23

Quote:You act as if Melv is ignoring isometrics entirely, when he's already stated very clearly, on numerous occasions, that work is being or will be done towards that end.

The most recent information I have on the subject is what was said in the FAQ:, "I personally think that T3D would be best suited for this but we do intend to look at this in T2D but I won't stick my neck out on dates." This doesn't sound like, "It's on my todo list" or, "It'll ship when T2D is finished." It sounds more like, "I think people who want isomaps should be making 3D games." Of course, it sounds like that because that's what he said ;) At the very least, the comment is, "We will evaluate it and get back to you at a later time." While not a full-fledged "No", it certainly isn't a "Yes, we understand the value of isometric tilemaps and games in a 2D environment, and will be doing what we can to fill this need before T2D finals."

Quote:To top it all off, the original point of this thread has been completely de-railed.

Your relentlessly linear concept of conversation bores me ;) As long as what is being discussed is substantive and important, it's hardly an unreasonable discussion.

On the plus side, I'm no longer concerned that Melv doesn't quite grasp the concept of isomaps. On the minus side, I'm now concerned about how whether we'll have them at all and how such implementation will look. Whether he does some kind of mapping thing to allow his physics response (that nobody will ever use with isomaps in anything real) to continue to function. Which, as I think about it, moves us back into the actually intended thread discussion.

#24 I'm feeling sick as hell and I come back and theres a religious debate over something as trivial as ISO maps, jeez. Let it go.

ISO tile-layers will get done and probably not with the capabilities I was thinking about a while ago. There's nothing stopping getting typical ISO-maps working with the engine at all. Problematic doesn't mean we'll have to hack it. Lots of stuff in T2D was problematic and challenging.

There will be a standard set of collision responses (bounce,rigid,clamp,sticky,none) throughout T2D and ISO-maps should be no exception. Perhaps we should just implement your concept of what ISO-maps should do and what they shouldn't? Why not ISO-pinball? People should do their own collision responses? Thanks for your advice but I regretfully choose not to take it. You can count that as an official response.

Collision responses are not stopping ISO-maps getting done, time is, that's all. But of course you've assumed that this is what is holding things up. It's actually spending time posting on fairly pointless debates that hurts T2D dev. Please don't take my words out of context to satisfy your arguments. If we choose to do ISO-maps now, people who want networking will complain. We do networking, people who want ISO-maps complain. You try writing T2D and still maintain your day job. Time is always the enemy here, not technology.

It must be really hard not hearing the response stated in the way you want to hear it. Sorry for not meeting your expectations there.

Telling you that you've got the source code and you can go and implement it is an option, not an instruction. Forums are full of people asking for stuff when they've got the source-code in front of them. It is a valid proposal and allows people to work on their solution without waiting for the official version. It is very easy to sit back and argue what people know or don't know and the reasons why you haven't got something in front of you now or never will have. I personally find your posts insulting.

You will get an editor to place tiles correctly and you'll be able to use existing ISO art. You'll be able to move all T2D objects within the ISO layer. You'll will get ISO-maps but there are a number of more pressing things to develop first. All this with me not understanding the concepts of ISO-maps. Pretty good eh?

All in good time so now for the sake of all that is good and wholesome, go and make games. That is what you're here for isn't it?

No more feeding here please.

- Melv.

Quote:On the plus side, I'm no longer concerned that Melv doesn't quite grasp the concept of isomaps

*bites lip*

#25 *tosses Melv a couple more cream scones for good measure. And a fresh cup of joe*

We love ya Melv! :)

#26 Running on no sleep is cool. After seeing Melv's comment about this turning in to a religious debate my mind has been frantically trying tomake a game out of it. Some religious war between characters, some who believe the world should be looked at as isometric, the others as a standard tile set. Not sure how it would work at all, but TheVoices[tm] are telling me it would be great.

#27 Rofl... as long as you have King BoB in there its all good ;)

lol my luck you'll make me a dillusional peasant that is insane and thinks hes the king of the rats or something

#28 Parallel plotlines. A party of isometric RPG adventurers stuck in a topdown world, and vice versa. Controls, collision, etc, should be all funky for each party. :-p

#29 Lol Joseph, that's an awesome idea. "The world is Rectilinear!!!" "That sounds disgusting and I refuse to believe it. It's Isometric I tell ye!!"

Smaug, Melv, no worries guys. Woo.... T2D design debates. :) Always exciting.

Smaug, I think you would reconsider the comments re: not understanding ISO if you knew the ridiculous amounts of time Melv and I put into researching and discussing this stuff. So many, many, many, many hours spent reading and talking about how to handle tiles and ISO tiles in particular.

Believe me, we get it. I don't think there's anybody who understands this stuff better than us by leaps and bounds, by any means. We're experts. :) Maybe we don't do a good job communicating it in quickie forum posts, but believe me, we are fully aware of what needs to be done for ISO, and how to handle it in T2D in particular.

Okay that's that. Smaug, sorry to reply to you individually. The below isn't in particular reply to you or anyhing. Just a general note for anyone interested in ISO tile plans and updates (and pretty much any other T2D feature, this is how the decision making process generally works...):

I am not going to give any more detail on our plans for ISO tiles as its becoming clear that revealing plans too early leads to too much needless debate and forum antics. :) Not anybody's fault there... I understand how it is to be waiting for updates from a project you're interested in. Hard not to jump on an issue you are knowledgable in and/or care about and make sure everyone involved "gets it", from your perspective. So, it's all good.

But since I have zero interest in spending too much time debating this stuff as opposed to working on everything that needs to get done, we'll just leave it at this for now:

-Yep, iso tiles would be very cool.
-We understand iso stuff extremely well.
-We understand T2D extremely well.
-Taking the above together, you should have some modicum of belief that we've figured the possible solutions in this problem space and have plans to handle them.

Then..

-Right now, you can do fakey / StarCraft-style "iso" in T2D.
-This gives people a stop-gap solution to get iso game types done in the engine.
-As such, we can't make iso tiles the most important thing on our to do list. There are other areas which don't have stop-gap solutions yet. We're working feverishly on those, and other cool stuff behind the scenes.

So, all in good time. And as always, if anyone out there wants to implement iso tiles on their own... go for it!!. That'd be sweet. Yeah, we've got nice plans for them, but you don't need to wait for us. If you're up to give this a shot yourself, great! Maybe we can use your stuff as the basis for our "official" solution at some point. Or, you can wait for us to get to this point on the giant "to do" list. Either way is cool. :)

Regardless, it's always good to hear what people think about T2D and future features. I don't mean to discourage such discussions and debates, it's good to see them.

Also, I can't guarantee that we'll have iso tiles in the future, but it is on the "to do" list now. As long as neither Melv or I kicks the can at an unnaturally young age, this should get done. :) I don't have any plans to remove it from the list.

#30

Quote:Perhaps we should just implement your concept of what ISO-maps should do and what they shouldn't? Why not ISO-pinball? People should do their own collision responses?

You're talking to a guy who has yet to concieve of a 2D game where he would ever use the default rigid-body collision response of T2D. So, I'm probably not the one you should be asking these kinds of questions of, since you already know my answer ;)

Quote:If we choose to do ISO-maps now, people who want networking will complain. We do networking, people who want ISO-maps complain.

I didn't ask for it now. In fact, I never said anything about a timeframe (except before 1.0). I was talking about its importance and the ease of implementation on T2D.

Quote:Some religious war between characters, some who believe the world should be looked at as isometric, the others as a standard tile set. Not sure how it would work at all, but TheVoices[tm] are telling me it would be great.

Hey, if you can make an actual game out of that, I'd buy it ;)

Quote:As such, we can't make iso tiles the most important thing on our to do list. There are other areas which don't have stop-gap solutions yet. We're working feverishly on those, and other cool stuff behind the scenes.

I certainly understand, and I agree with you on how to prioritize functionality. However, what I can't do is reconcile this to the apparent priorities of the prior efforts in deciding what goes into the EA release.

Take the T2D particle system. You can build, make, and ship a game without any form of a particle system. This is certainly possible. NES games never had a "particle system"; they just spawned an explosion sprite animation. At the very least, in terms of an Early Adopter release, it's easy enough to develop a game and put particles in at the end as a final polishing pass of the game.

Take networking. If you want to have a networked game, in real-time, you need networking, plain and simple. And, because of the pervasiveness of networked code (it gets into everything), you absolutely must have it when you start making your game.

Now, take isomaps. You have to change the code (the StarCraft "hack", while visually nice, lacks some of the features of true iso-maps) if you really want to have isometric maps. And you have to do this first, before you can start on the actual game. You can't develop using regular tilemaps and then switch everything to isomaps as a polishing pass at the end of the game. Having isomap support is absolutely essential to an entire style of 2D games.

By the logic you just presented, the EA release should have had networking, isomaps, or some other more crucial-to-gameplay functionality than particle systems. So, I guess the point I'm making is that T2D's priorities have not always aheared to the logic you've presented, so it's hardly unreasonable to postulate that they will not always do so in the future.

Note: I am not suggesting you make isomaps, networking, or any other specific feature your priority. I'm just suggesting that you make gameplay features your priority over things like, say, bumpmapped sprites or other such "window dressing".

#31 Sigh...

#32 @Smaug: I take your point about the particle system but an understanding of how T2D came about is key here, something which you may not know anything about being a new member of the GG community.

I started T2D (9 months ago) as almost a side-project for me and as I developed it, I posted lots of information on what I was working on and there is a complete linked set of plans showing all the progress. Originally, T2D was going to be a free release and wasn't associated with GG in any way, other than the fact that I was using their engine. During the development, Jeff Tunnell (head of GG) contacted me and discussed the possibility of allowing GG to publish the engine and allow them to help me bring the feature list into something that could be sold. At this point, lots of stuff needed to be done. This was the core functionality that you raise.

I was very happy to do this but way before this happened, the particle engine was already written. The priorities up to this point were based on the fun of developing them, very little more. Since the GG collaboration, we've developed a more robust core functionality, such as swept collision detection, tile-map collisions and lots of other underlying stuff and the priorites have definately been correct.

Your other points that relate to networking are just not correct. The swept CD was done so that we could then integrate the networking. Networking is already part of TGE, we don't need to develop the fundamentals here. All T2D objects as based upon "SimObject" which can quickly be switched to "NetObject" so that they become network aware with very little extra effort. Datablocks are already network aware. Then we can move to adding the prediction and server-integration code that we've already planned in detail.

This work was finished just before Christmas and we've focused on beta-testing, packaging, documentation, demos and other stuff before the EA release. There was no time to finish the networking unless we wanted to delay the EA release. Early Adopter. The product isn't finished and we're working on core stuff right now, we're not developing "bumpmapped sprites" or "window dressing". You consider the core-capabilities such as swept collision-detection, mounting, rotation/scaling, scrollers, rect tile-maps, animation etc as "window dressing". Using the example of having particles in an EA release is flawed without all the relevant information.

I understand you're not talking about timelines (we don't like doing that either as it's just too early) but you're suggesting that our priorities are incorrect and I just disagree with you. The documentary evidence of what we've focused on over the last 5-6 months stands for itself.

I think we'll just differ on our opinions here and leave it at that.

- Melv.

#33 You can literaly still follow Melv's plans way back to when he started, there a huge ammount of them which detail his work since the beginning of the concept... I found them about half way and was following since (after reading all the previous ones)

#34 @Smaug: Dude. Debating why the guys chose to make the decisions they've already made is really pointless. You're late to the party there. (Particles are generally useful to more people than iso-maps anyway.)

No offense to you, but I'd rather let Melv work on the engine than explain why something that's already done was done--especially when you can go dig through the old plans and read it for yourself.

#35 Always glad to hear opinions on what people think are the most important features. Looking at large numbers of such opinions helps indicate what features are the most important. I don't expect everyone to agree with every development priority we set. People value different features differently, so that'd be just about impossible.

I'm pretty self-critical, but speaking honestly and even with the benefit of some hindsight now, I wouldn't have changed anything in our dev priorites so far. Again, always good to hear opinions and reasoning for this kind of thing. Taking many such opinions into account and trying to balance them against each other as well as what we simply know needs to be done, as best as I can tell, we're right on target.

In any case, at least we can say for sure that we're working our hardest and trying our best to do a good job for everyone. It's great that most people appreciate all the hard work, thanks guys!

Back to the grindstone for us now, lots of important stuff to work on. :)