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super conflict: lol
that's the same as classic rotk2 with staggered ortho, with X axis spacing between the 'squares' ('rectangles'? hehe) heh.
i have no qualms with making all tiles render at a different x/y offset as their map position would indicate… and i don't particular mind doing a mindset of 'render bottom to top, left to right'… just so long as some considerations are paid:
if units get drawn on top of tiles after the fact, they will be standing on top of, say, castle tiles that are taller than the tile height below them.
if tiles can instead be drawn on top of units, unit information can be obscured by tiles then (units will be 'behind it').
lots of games that do this kind of thing would conceal things under the taller-than-should-be-tile, or would mark the tile it bled into as impassible, etc.
with drawing bottom to top, any part of the tile that sticks over the top will need to be within the border of the top horizontal line (otherwise, < or > edges of the tiles left/right of it will over write it.
tile map effects that go against-the-grain of the tile render order will have to be faked anyway (ie: if you want vines hanging down from another tile into partially the tile below).
if it matters any, i learned years ago that just a lot of manual blended-tiles ended up being better/easier than attempting to force effects via render order heh.
If you have a better way of doing this, go ahead. I know some stuff about programming, but I'm not Nasir!
top to bottom in the case of wanting tiles allowed to be taller than they should be… whatever.
but the proper bleed ability would be the stuff marked in yellow:
Why limit it to that? A castle at the blue tile is still in front of the tiles northeast and northwest of that.
well, i do know that getting proper rendering out of tiled would prolly be a PITA :)
16 hours ago, was talking with the lead dev of Tiled, and he was saying he had staggered ortho isometric put into the next version already. that possibly solves these problems ?
i'd have to relook at it, but afaik Wesnoth limits tiles to be within their own boundaries ?
That'll definitely work, seeing as that;s how it works in vanilla rotk2 XD
As for wesnoth, not only do they extend past the boundaries, but they extend past the boundaries in every direction and therefore have a LOT of tiles. Aren't you glad we're only going upwards? Case in point: Sunken Ruin is 104 tiles, with an additional 33 for the sunken keep.
re: different 'upwards png'
i suppose if you draw every other X tile you should be fine…
ie: drawing B, then C, then the barely visible 'D' (heh)…. then on next pass drawing A…
cause if you rendered B, A, C…. C would overwrite A.
wesnoth appears to have only a few tiles that extend beyond the reach of the hexagon… the rest is just lots of different tiles.
if those things that are on top of the tiles are 'background objects' or not i dunno.
isometric will make unit drawing a bit weird.
Wesnoth has a lot of tiles that extend beyond the hexagon actually, due to terrain boundaries. If you have an ocean next to grasslands, the grasslands don't suddenly stop; they extend onto the water tile as a shoreline. When you get down to it, the only wesnoth tiels that don't involve extending to others or receiving extensions are houses completely surrounded by their matching terrain type… and even then, some of them are tall enough to extend upwards.
EDIT: Come to think of it, we'll need to decide which direction we'll make borders… and quite possibly extend in both directions.
i dunno, looking at wesnoth and images of its tiles it really does look like it's got multiple renderings. ie: the things bigger than a hexagon have completely transparent 'ground'.
a 'deep background', that would hold most of it… then an overlay/objects layer that would have stuff that is possibly bigger than a tile but the mapper would take care to not place these on top of each other….
as far as border tiles such as your coastal stuff.. those look to be object as well ?
hm
immediate decision would be:
constrained hexagon (my preference)
isometric / staggered isometic (a good possibility, requires more work).
i'm leaning towards the flat constrained hexagons because it means that something interactive and playable can be achieved without too much fuck-around-ery and in short order.
changing the graphics and rendering of the battlescape shouldn't really change game logic any… mostly just the maps themselves would need to be re-tiled and re-mapped. Tedious, but by far not the end of the world.
i'm not saying that prettier battlescape design shouldn't be on the menu, and can be debated & decided upon later (i agree it needs to be done) … but there's something to be said for kicking it out of the 'constant design' phase and into play testing :)
not gonna stomp my feet on this just yet for 'flat tile biatch'… gonna give it 24hr while thinking it over hehe.
btw, i'd like to see how a staggered isometric square map feels… i do know that standard isometric stuff has been overdone IMHO and always makes me feel like i'm leaning to one side heh.
Well, for now we can use tiles that don't cross into other tiles; we can do more advanced stuff once we have things working.
hex tiles that don't bleed out beyond their boundaries for now it is. functionality over prettiness to start :cheers:. as far as the flare map format that forces 3 layers, we'll have the background / map layer, and then a layer for making special tiles somehow (only immediate use is hand placed starting positions, a possible future thought would be spots where a random rebel force could spawn!%!@… cough…). the third layer will go unused afaik.
to re-iterate, i fully agree that the battlescape would need a graphical update later.
for now, i'm not even gonna support animating tiles just yet. if i feel froggy i'll implement it since that's easiest / quickest.
to begin with, i was happy with just staggered squares like the original, but as i put more thought into it i was wanting to do a lot more…. and i caught myself snowballing (as is typical with design-stage of a project) and last night decided really need to put a stop to that heh.
and conversations here about ideas didn't help :).
so, isometric staggered, over sized tiles, etc will have to wait. something to note — a lot of this may be moot if the system is moved to a 3d rendering of the battlescape :P
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