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Isometric Conversion Woes

Started by Lance Mazon Sep 12, 2012 at 4:19 AM 3 replies 1.6k views

Original Post

Sep 12, 2012 at 4:19 AM

I just added to my game engine the ability to handle isometric tiles. Here's a sample of my placeholder tiles:

It's all working great, except, I have stored the tiles in a Dictionary(so that I can quickly update a particular tile as needed) and now need to render each tile sprite in a particular order, or the screen is a mess. Tiles must be rendered in order with those tiles with a higher x/y value being rendered first, so those on the left side and bottom of the screen are the only ones showing their sides. Am I going about this right? Or is there a much better way? Thank you in advance.

Lance...

Ashaman73

Sep 12, 2012 at 5:53 AM

You are right here as long as you don't use some kind of zbuffering.

The problem of determing the visiblity is, that you need to render the hidden parts first. A iso map could be seen as a map of cubes, which are subdivided by planes. Therefore you can take a binary space partition algorithm to render your scene, which results in the simplified order you have mentioned.

yewbie

Sep 12, 2012 at 2:56 PM

Since you are using C# and I am hoping XNA?
When you do your spriteBatch.Draw (For each tile) base the final argument (LayerDepth) on the Y value of your isometric tile.

Lance Mazon

Sep 12, 2012 at 9:49 PM

You are right here as long as you don't use some kind of zbuffering.

The problem of determing the visiblity is, that you need to render the hidden parts first. A iso map could be seen as a map of cubes, which are subdivided by planes. Therefore you can take a binary space partitionalgorithm to render your scene, which results in the simplified order you have mentioned.

Thanks... I'll check out the link. =D

Since you are using C# and I am hoping XNA?
When you do your spriteBatch.Draw (For each tile) base the final argument (LayerDepth) on the Y value of your isometric tile.

Using OpenGL, though I do plan on adding an abstraction layer soon so I can use whatever. I think it's important to get a working game first though. =D

On a related note, I've been referencing NUnit for a while with the intention of using it, and finally got around to implementing a few tests of my tile, and tilemanager classes. It's already uncovered a couple issues. Thank you NUnit! =D

Lance Mazon

Sep 12, 2012 at 10:46 PM

Got it working. NUnit to the rescue. I had a couple silly errors in my code. I was thinking about it correctly, as mentioned. =D Thanks for the help.

Lance...

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