Concept help

Quote:

Original post by Anonymous Poster I've never played starcraft, but I remember reading somewhere that the starcraft engine used square tiles, not iso tiles.... But the cube you drew at first could also be how it was done, i.e. with a large square that has the front edges of it textured and not the back as in normal iso renderings, then again it might use the normal iso rendering for walls... please note that I'm posting this at 1:11 AM and my minds starting to wander off on to more important things, like sleep :D so I could be wrong

starcraft use Isometric for terrain and square tiles for everything else...
I checked the editor.

The image you posted is dimetric, not isometric! (as are most 'iso' engines, they're almost all di- or even trimetric)

Apart from that, I think that Blizzard uses a separate "cliff" type of vertical tile. They do it in Warcraft 3, and I assume the principle is the same (I believe the same programmer was responsible for both and thus similarities are likely).

A square that is raised will get four cliff tiles attached to it, or less, if it's adjacent to other raised tiles. So essentially, the three polygons you have outlined in the red cube are the tiles.

However, your approach seems to work, as well. Just a little confusing for the artist and I don't know whether Starcraft doesn't give jack shit about altitude differences itself (what happens when an aerial unit flies across the cliff? will it 'drop' or will it maintain the same altitude?) - sincethe technique shown in the lower picture seems to be entirely oblivious of altitude differences!

So is it safe to assume that they might have just used those vertical tiles to determine collison between terrain and units?

Start your Starcraft editor again, and turn on the Grid. That is exactly how the tiles are; very small square tiles.