bradwall
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Maybe have the board be an angled view instead of a straight top down view. This would make the game seem more 3D without getting into the whole 3D type of game.
For example, here is an image of freeciv that shows a 2D kind of game looking more 3D:
http://www.easylinux.de/Artikel/ausgabe/2003/07/052-freeciv/freeciv-chat2.png

Also (to show that the game is still tiled:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/graphics/freeciv.png


Just a thought.

Mattcrampy
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Isometric, you mean? It's the traditional way of displaying rooms in 3D before polygons, for sure, but isometric rooms bring their own problems. For instance, have you ever tried to navigate a twisty corridor in an isometric view? Then you haven't played Marble Madness and should remedy that. Also, Beethro can disappear behind obstacles in an isometric view, which is not ideal.

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bradwall
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Mattcrampy wrote:
Isometric, you mean? It's the traditional way of displaying rooms in 3D before polygons, for sure, but isometric rooms bring their own problems. For instance, have you ever tried to navigate a twisty corridor in an isometric view? Then you haven't played Marble Madness and should remedy that. Also, Beethro can disappear behind obstacles in an isometric view, which is not ideal.

Well, if you don't angle it too much, it shouldn't be too bad.
Or, if you have ever played the Sims, you can do something similar to that... where the walls 'break' open when you or other items are behind it. You can tell that there is still a wall there, however, it will let you view the room. Or, just make the wall small enough that you still see what's going on.

EDIT: Example of sims with them behind wall:
http://www.applelinks.com/reviews/gifs/sims-vacation2.jpg

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[Last edited by bradwall at 09-13-2005 06:24 PM]

Chris
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bradwall wrote:
Maybe have the board be an angled view instead of a straight top down view.

If you look closely, you'll see that it's already angled. We're looking from somewhere 'south' of straight above the board.

For example, here is an image of freeciv that shows a 2D kind of game looking more 3D:
http://www.easylinux.de/Artikel/ausgabe/2003/07/052-freeciv/freeciv-chat2.png

OMG, has Germany invaded Iraq now as well?

That doesn't look any more 3D than DROD does really, and doesn't fit very well onto the screen without either scrolling or wasting half the available space. My monitor isn't diamond-shaped.

Mattcrampy
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Trivia:

The view that DROD currently uses is usually called a 3/4 view. It's often used by console RPGs, notably Zelda. An isometric view is where the grid is diamond shaped rather than rectangular or square, and is ideally suited for doing 3D games without a 3D engine.

My biggest concern is that I can't really see the point other than making the game sort of look 3D. It seems like an awful lot of work for nothing if you aren't going to create a 3D environment.

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trick
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I'm a big fan of isometric graphics, if done right, but I don't think it'd work very well for a game like DROD. For everything to be visible, walls might have to be see-through for large parts of a room (not only to show monsters, but other objects as well, like orbs, doors, trapdoors, ortho squares, force arrows, etc), and things just wouldn't look as good with holes all over the place. An alternative could be to make the height of walls and closed doors and such very low, but that wouldn't look very good either, I think.

Also, as Chris touched on, a square room would be diamond-shaped in an isometric engine; to fill the rectangualar screen space, you'd have to make the rooms more diamond shaped (from a non-iso viewpoint). Maximum possible room sizes would also differ. An isometric tile is made out of two 2D tiles placed beside each other, assuming a standard 2:1 isometric ratio. This includes one full tile, plus 4 quarters of 4 neighbouring tiles, so you still get 2 tiles total, it's just distributed differently. A DROD room is 38x32 tiles. To get an isometric room of the same size, you'd need... uh... about 70x35 2D tiles, I think (the numbers get a little wonky because of the rotation, etc). Half of the space taken up by these would be blank, of course, but it would be distributed so that you can't just cut it off. What I'm trying to say is that an isometric room would have to be smaller than a top-down room, unless you fill in the blank space with tiles, in which case it would be roughly the same size but completely differently distributed, so rooms from top-down DROD and isometric DROD still wouldn't be compatible (well, unless we add scrolling...).

Even if all of these little obstacles were overcome, the graphics engine of the current DROD would be pretty much useless for an isometric engine, so we'd have to code a new graphics engine more or less from scratch. This would take time. All graphics would have to be redone as well, of course.

- Gerry

Chris
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trick wrote:
[...]you'd need... uh... about 70x35 2D tiles, I think (the numbers get a little wonky because of the rotation, etc)

I remember the nightmare I had making this map of the old ZX Spectrum game SpinDizzy. Warning: that's a large image, 700kb or so of compressed .png. I took a screenshot of each of the several hundred rooms in the game and stuck them together using a really scary script which worked out which bits overlapped which other bits. So I'm kind of aware of the calculations that you went through there.

Isometric projection worked well for spindizzy, but like a lot of isometric games the keyboard controls are strange - you press the 'up' key to go "northeast" and 'left' to go "northwest". You end up with your head at a 60 degree angle to your body to compensate.

Or perhaps that's just me.

Tim
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Chris wrote:
the keyboard controls are strange - you press the 'up' key to go "northeast" and 'left' to go "northwest". You end up with your head at a 60 degree angle to your body to compensate.

Or perhaps that's just me.

Isn't it much easier to turn your keyboard a bit? At least that's how I played these games now...

For those new people here, there is a fully 3D version of DROD (KDD) available. Just look at the links section of drod.net.

-- Tim

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stigant
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Since DROD allows movement in all 8 directions, you could just remap the up cardinal directions to the diagonal keys and vice versa.

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Chris
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I couldn't find the links section on drod.net. It seems you can get DROD3D (but only for Windows) here: http://www.tlkgames.com/

I also found this thread: http://www.drod.net/forum/viewtopic.php?TopicID=2846 in which absolutely everyone slates the game.

I think I'll stick with what I know thanks.

trick
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Chris wrote:

trick wrote:
[...]you'd need... uh... about 70x35 2D tiles, I think (the numbers get a little wonky because of the rotation, etc)

I remember the nightmare I had making this map of the old ZX Spectrum game SpinDizzy. Warning: that's a large image, 700kb or so of compressed .png. I took a screenshot of each of the several hundred rooms in the game and stuck them together using a really scary script which worked out which bits overlapped which other bits. So I'm kind of aware of the calculations that you went through there.

Actually I just winged it . Afterwards I thought a little about it and found out that my wild estimate was in fact correct. You see, isometric calculations may seem hard, but in my experience most of them are in fact suspiciously simple -- for example, to get the width and height of a rectangular map in an isometric world like I did above, just add the width and height of the rectangular map to get the new width of the isometric map, and then divide that by two to get the new height. In fact, when converting from rectangular maps, the new width is always double the new height. That may sound a bit weird, but you should be able to verify it if you think about it a bit .

Isometric projection worked well for spindizzy, but like a lot of isometric games the keyboard controls are strange - you press the 'up' key to go "northeast" and 'left' to go "northwest". You end up with your head at a 60 degree angle to your body to compensate.

Maybe it would be easier to rotate the keyboard in stead, or remap to the numpad ? . Another alternative is to just not try to compensate at all -- it's weird at first, but your brain adjusts after a little while. Works great for me, at least.

- Gerry

Chris
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trick wrote:In fact, when converting from rectangular maps, the new width is always double the new height.

Only if there are no mountains though...