Seige Engine

Do you *need* full 3D or are you just looking to have a perspective view? You can easily do multiple floors with regular 2D tiles to fake your perspective - just figure out which level you''re on and draw those tiles -- think of it like this

Here is your top level

 WWWWWWWWWWWWWW 
 WFFFFFFFFFFFFW 
 WFFFFFFFFFFFFW 
 WFFFFFSFFFFFFW 
 WWWWWWWWWWWWWW 

pretty boring, with only 4 walls, some floor and a stairway, but you get the picture.  
 

Now, all of those tiles are going to be opaque - but if you put a hole in the floor, you''ll need to see whats beneath, so you''ll need to render the next level down - or at least what''s going to be visible under the opening. You could also do something similar to parallax scrolling, where the lower levels "move" more "slowly" - that is, moving 1 space up on the current level might move the lower level only 3/4s as fast ... The code itself should be similar to much of the code in any of the tile code from most tile tutorials, with the addition of rendering any sub-layers first...

Hope this is what you''re looking for

KB

Dungeon Siege is 3D; therefore, you need 3D tiles.

The move from 2D tile-based games is not that hard once you figure out how to create seamless 3D tiles. I have an engine for my next book that uses 3D tiles to form complete maps.

It didnt take me very long to get the tiles working together, the main piece of work came from creating the actual tiles (always ran into seam problems since +/- 0.0005 can make a difference in 3D.)


LostLogic
www.lostlogic.com
Author, Multiplayer Game Programming