So far I’ve just run an automatic conversion script on ChestHole. I’d love to have a real isometric tileset to play with, and I’d be a lot more likely to finish development on the branch if there was a usable tileset.
For now isometric tiles have to have an even width, and the bottom width by halfwidth rectangle of a flat isometric tile should contain a rhombus for the square floor. Example tiles are in the patch in the ChestHole_iso tileset. The other important change is that tilesets can manually specify rotated versions of tiles. Where before we had this:
"fg":1000,
"bg":2000
now you can do this if you draw fg pointing in four different directions (like for a piece of terrain or furniture):
There’s still no way to animate, I’m afraid. I think what Sparr wants is a straight up isometric tileset, one that doesn’t look flat like his conversion of mine.
I am so excited to be able to tile isometric, starting tomorrow or the next day. I will make you proud, Sparr.
I’ll add my words of encouragement to the pile aswell.
Though it may be worth considering some sort of auto tileset converter over pure iso tiles. It’ll be alot easier to keep the iso system up to date in the future if it can ‘borrow’ work from another tileset.
or perhaps a mixture where tiles that you dont have isotiles for yet get autoconverted from another set.
The patch includes a converter, it’s gfx/make_iso.py. It’s pretty general, but I’ve only tested and tweaked it for ChestHole. It needs a lot more work. In particular, it should be modified to load the terrain json file so it can handle walls and impassable terrain and such differently and get some depth into the sprites.
An isometric tileset would be great, we would get a really fake 3d effect, especially if we add facing sprites to monsters/characters (45 toward, 45 away). Walls could be built ‘upward’ to give them a 3d look, but since they are 1x1 already, there is no need for more than a single tile still for those.
I have done some tile/sprite/pixel work before, and isometric is one of my favorite views. But I haven’t done that kind of work in some time, and I already have a million other projects.
Could someone compile a Win32 version of this? Or help me compile one? KA101, could you accept the PR for just one experimental build? STK2008 doesn’t have linux.
I’m compiling on linux, and I get the error:
/usr/bin/ld: unrecognized -a option
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [cataclysm-tiles.exe] Error 1
If someone explains this to me, i’d love to convert mine to this. It’s not finished yet, but i guess it would be fun to see how it’d look.
Like, how it really works? Do i need to convert my tileset in some way to do it?
Maybe someone can do that dor me and then i start to draw. I was never good with this stuff anyways.
Really nice work you are doing here, you all! I love how this looks, a lot. Hey, Chezzo, maybe if you make the wall tiles centered instead of pasted to the bottom they would not have that weird thing in the north corner. Just thinking here, but it seriously looks awesome.
I should continue my tileset. Sadly, school, Doom, and people.
The converter is a python script in the gfx directory, if you check out the branch/PR that I linked to originally. It’s only tested with ChestHole, but if you tell me the name of your tileset then I’ll see if I can get it updated to work with that too. It only does a very basic job, producing something barely playable. It will take manual work to start making tiles with height like Chezzo’s recent examples.
Mine isn’t converted, but actual graphics I made to look (sorta) like the tiles. I think to make this look reasonably good you will need some decent iso art (like mine, but better wouldn’t hurt). Also don’t feel obligated to make the tile fill the entire graphic.
Edit: The biggest issue is that I don’t have time to do the half a billion tiles that CDDA needs to really look good.
My recommendation would be to start with some generic colored blocks for most things. Like stone walls will be grey blocks, wood ones brown, and so on. Then as you get people interested they can customize each block to look less stupid. You can use a pre-existing tiles as ‘floor’ tiles and pre-existing item images for… well items.
If you want me to do some basic tile work, give me a list of the ‘most needed’ tiles (say 10 to start), and i’ll see if I can’t do up a few. But I really really don’t have time to do them all.
I whould love to help with the iso tileset, but what about the basic animation in the game? With “animation not working” you mean that are disabled the walking sprites, or anything that is animated is off? (bullets, damage, driving, etc)
I ask this 'cuz i wish to create a tileset for a friend, and help with this iso tileset is a good chance. But if it’s unplayable, my main point goes away and i’ll have to find another solution.
Anyway i’ll leave here a tile or two, in Chase style (i like the squared tilesets) so i’ll be usefull in any case.
All the tiles are grey, 'cuz i haven’t played cataclysm in a while and i don’t remember the stucrutes details. The gray colors are easily switchable into something else.
That’s some nice work. I like those, I might do some more to night.
EDIT: I updated my bench to be less… ‘clean’ looking. But I noticed that our iso blocks are not compatible (that is they are slightly different sizes).
