ID:162
 
As a project that will hopefully turn into a game sometime in the future, I started working on isometric stuff in BYOND. I'm trying for a fairly generic engine that would be easily re-usable for multiple games.

One problem that I'm worried about is hitting BYOND's object limit. Whatever game I make will probably have to be either single-player, or multi-player on just a single, not too large map. The isometric tiles are created using either turfs, or pixel-offsetted overlays on those turfs. Anything else(like the walls in the screenshot below) will end up being either an obj, or a mob. Each wall object is really four objs. Two for the bottom left and right, and two for the top left and right.

Here's a screenshot of a 4x4 isometric map made in BYOND. Each tile is 64x32. I had tried 32x16 earlier, but that tile size was fairly small. Also, out of every four isometric tiles, three would have needed to be represented by an overlay.

And here's a screenshot with some half-height walls randomly placed on top of the tiles.

Comments, criticism, and a way to get antialiased models to render out without a black line all the way around are welcome. :)

Edit: After looking around for awhile, I found a plugin to do exactly what I wanted. Here's a screenshot with antialiased walls(the walls also have a different texture size). Goodbye jaggies!
Looks like a fine engine :)
Looks splendid. :)

I'm looking quite forward to seeing this in action, and what sinister intentions you have for this isometric goodness!
looks great Jon! now you can help me create an OGRE game based on it! :p
Nice work. As we found with Living & Dead, object count is an issue, and drawing speed, and etc. But the more experimentation in this direction, the more likely we are to have realistic options!
Looks great, Jon! I just wonder why you need to use objs for the walls. You can set overlays on differnt layers and pixel offsets to display them on the turf.
I sure hate that three month delay between when you press "Save" and when it posts. Don't you, Shadowdarke? :-P
sexy sexy!
Shadowdarke, you're right. Since I originally posted I made a change so that overlays are used for all the "tile" of an object except for the bottom two.

However, I've run into a bug I've been unable to track down. When an isometric object is placed at a certain position on my map, for some reason the top-right portion of the object disappears. Either the overlay for it isn't created, or it isn't showing up properly.