Current Development of the Engine.

A day late on the blog post, but I thought now would be a good time to update on the actual engine itself. Currently the engine is being optimized and ported to a fresh project file since the current one everything sits in, is a cluttered mess for testing all the functions and idea's I have had for the engine over the past month. It really is a disaster for those who do not know there way around the project file.

The depth of the issue

Probably one of, if not the most tricky issues with isometric is ordering tiles and objects with depth so they appear correctly. Higher terrain or things like tree's and buildings should appear "over" anything behind it yet be behind anything in front of it otherwise you will start to get clipping of images, where some parts are behind or over images they shouldn't be.

I know, it seems complicated and with certain situations it can be, but in this blog post I will describe how I handle depth in the Isometric Engine. As I have described before the engine works from a top down perspective and merely draws stuff into an isometric view. This works in my favor in many ways but does have a draw back or two x).

Putting the world into Perspective

One of the first things I did before even typing a single bit of code for the engine was to do some research on isometric engines created before and how they went about it. This wasn't limited to just the GameMaker software either, I looked through many different sources from programming it all in C++ to Unity. It's always good to absorb as much info as possible, just because it might not be the software or language you are using, doesn't mean there might not be a hidden tidbit you can use ;). After going over some of the most common methods I knew I really wanted a simple way to do it, not just for myself but for anyone else wanting to use the engine and you can't really get much simpler then the premise of the game being a top down map that is drawn in an isometric perspective. Here I'll explain how, in a tutorial style I handle the actual isometric coordinates in the engine.