Question about creating isometric game tiles.

Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 03:08

Hi guys, I'm just wondering if isometric floor tiles would be handy? I found a gimp script which generates isometric tiles from regular tilable textures, so I can churn out a bunch of floor tiles. Here is one for an example: http://i.imgur.com/5RzQ3.png However I have some technical questions for someone who uses an isometric engine.

What dimensions should the tiles be?

Are transition tiles required (grass to stone for instance), or does the engine handle that? Would the transition tiles need to be in every direction and do they need corners?

Are normal and specular maps required?

Is the tile above suitable? Am I better off generating them in blender instead?

Is there anything else I need to know about isometric tiles or engines?

TheAncientGoat

joined 15 years 5 months ago

Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 03:31

The results look good! There are a couple of realistic isometric games, like FLARE and PARPG, so they'd definitely come in handy

Clint Bellanger

joined 15 years 9 months ago

Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 08:44

p0ss,

Dimensions vary by engine, but most at least stick to powers-of-two. E.g. my engine uses 64px by 32px base tiles.
Some engines use two floor layers, with the uppermost using alpha transparency to easily blend different tile types. My engine uses simple transition tiles (I use a hard map load between major areas, so I don't need many transitions within one tileset).
Normal and spec maps aren't used during runtime in typical 2D isometric games. If a particular tile only looks good with its normal/spec map, it's better to render it isometric in Blender
You can test tiles using the free map editor Tiled http://mapeditor.org

p0ss

joined 14 years 5 months ago

Monday, February 21, 2011 - 15:01

Thanks guys, I'll add this to my todio list then, thanks for the insight :)

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Question about creating isometric game tiles.