Xna isometric game engine

Ah remember those high graphic computer games before 3D Games became a mainstay? Those were isometric games — basically 2d games with 3d perspective: Many old school great computer games, including some with highly detail graphics have used isometric perspective. Below are a list of tools that you can use to create an isometric game or graphics, i took the website blurb where available and pasted it below so describe the game better not in any particular order :.

Note the Alternativa Engine is 3d now, so I removed it from the official list, however is still worth checking out it looks pretty impressive! I was intrigued when I initially came across IsoWorld.

Your program knows how to move and it already knows positions of objects in terms of grid cells. You just need to mark the object in that grid on if you can move through it or not. I usually do this by creating data structures, one for static objects and one for objects that change. The static objects are filled with objects that tell the game how to render the map. It also says if you can move through that tile or not.

Thus to see if you can move there, you get all of the objects in that grid space and check them all for the flag. If all allow you to pass, then you can move through it. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

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Viewed 5k times. Firstly, here are the major differences between the two maps: Book: Tiles are 32x Clamp value. I can see that I could probably deal with engine which you designed. If you would share the engine with me I could credit you as a co creator.

Or maybe you have better ideas for me. Maybe you want to work on something together Sincerely, Kris. The lighting and weather effects is the best I've seen along with the asset layering works spot on. The only thing that is missing is shadows.

Dude, seriously, I'd be willing to pay a decent amount to use this engine but you do you of course. I wander how hard it is to recreate in unity. I wonder if Obsidian Entertainment would be interested in this. They use a fusion of 2d and 3d elements in pillars of eternity, in unity.

They probably want to make Pillars of Eternity 3 after their current project, they now have funding from Microsoft they were acquired , and no doubt they want to make PoE 3 as pretty as humanly possible. There might be something here for them. If you are not going to use this, you should try and reach out. Thursday, 6 September 2. I keep getting questions regarding some of the more technical aspects of my 2. First things first, the original codebase at the moment is very outdated still on XNA 3.

It was one of my first projects, it's very badly organised and, at the same time, I do have plans for it in the future, so I won't be releasing the whole source code for the time being. That said, let's take a look at the basics. Overview The idea was very simple - to do away with drawing polygons for the most part and, instead, deal with geometry in screenspace, as an extension of the sprites you'd normally use in a 2D engine.

Cons: Right off the bat, I'll come out and say that this isn't necessarily as great a performance-saving idea as it seemed to me back then.

You're still doing a lot of work across the whole screen with pixel shaders, which is where the majority of the computation time comes in anyway. Moreover, you're essentially loading every sprite three times over, so you have a pretty high memory usage too and unlike in 3D rendering, where you can easily have much smaller resolution normal textures with high-resolution diffuse maps, you can't really do that here without sacrificing quality dramatically.

I'm pretty sure something similar could implemented in say, Unity3D, with the right scripting and customised shaders, but I don't think this approach will ever be much of a performance saver - certainly not as much of one as I thought back at the time, when my understanding of computational expenses was still very limited.

And while on more modern handheld devices you could probably get something like it to run, it'll probably need to be a fairly pared-down version due to restraints on how much per-pixel computation you can do and due to memory restraints.

Bear in mind you could easily get a very similar effect with a fully 3D engine, rendered out with an isometric perspective. If you don't make the geometry too complicated, your memory usage would likely be significantly lower as you'd be able to share textures between objects, while the per-pixel computation overhead would be the same as with the 2. By going 2. Pros: With that in mind, here's what I see as some of the advantages. The main reason to go down this route, I think, mostly comes down to content creation and stylistic considerations since, as I've pointed out above, there's no real reason to do so for performance or graphics, with one exception.

I think, graphically, the only real advantages here are the potential capacity for dealing with really huge polycounts by baking them into your sprites and getting a limited sort of multisampling for free, as your assets are likely going to come out of 3DS Max nicely antialised I say 'limited' because geometrical intersections are not going to antialias themselves and, indeed, can end up looking quite rough.

Even so, they're a bit dubious - you don't really need huge polycounts and even if you do: They're not all that expensive, relatively speaking. It's actually pretty easy to combine pre-rendered elements with an otherwise fully 3D isometric engine.

But here's a few boons contentwise. The main, really, I think is that you can do a lot of the texturing work much more easily on flat sprites. While you need a 3D mesh initially to generate a rudimentary colour map, normal map and heightmap, you can then do a lot of extra detailing in an image editor like Photoshop. You can bake in very high-quality ambient lighting from your 3D program without any overhead and you can also potentially save time on a lot of UV mapping and texture creation. You also get a little bit more freedom with how you go about creating assets in the first place - while you can start off making a simple mesh for calculating normal and height data, you could use a flat photo, or a hand-drawn sprite for the colour, essentially giving it extra depth.

Assets Quite briefly, this is how I generated the assets I used in my videos and here's a sample of one. I'm going with the Utah teapot on this:. Posted by 9of9 at Email This BlogThis!

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