Isometry, yay!

So, I managed to get my isometric code going today for my little MMO.

I've never done it before, so it was a bit of a challenge. Being a 3d guy mostly, I was well prepared to break out the matrices and do what was needed, but I managed to find all of the old school pixel shortcutty algorithms (that all work very nicely with Flash, it being quite a lot like an old school platform.)

The thing that bit me in the ass for the longest was the fact that my tiles weren't quite right. I did my own programmer art of course, in Flash, and ran into all sorts of problems:

1. Flash anti-aliases even if you tell it not to.
2. Flash does weird things with the image size it outputs, sometimes it uses the canvas size, and sometimes something else. It's a bit weird.

There was more as well, but I've forgotten them. Flash however is great for programmer art - Vector art and programmers are a natural fit. Once I figured out what I needed to do to get isometric art going, it was a snap. Basically, you draw a square, you rotate it 45 degrees and then you squish it so its height is half its width. Bam, there's your isometric base panel, and all your isometric lines can derive from that. (Quite easily in Flash as well).

So I had fun for an hour or two messing with isometric graphics, and got a good placeholder for my game. I still need a real artist, or I need to spend a few days myself (which I currently don't have) - we'll see how it goes.

Behold, my programmer art!



Anyway, I'd like to put together a real post on how to do this, as I had to scour tons of different half-complete tutorials to put together what I needed to do this the right way. Lots of very old stuff out there.

And is it just me, or do you hate it when you read someones post or tutorial about some math related thing and they don't define all their variables? GAH.

Anyway, that's my shift at the salt mine, I'm off to bed.