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[astrospoon]

Whenever 3/4 top-down 2d games (think 2D Zelda) attempt to portray elevation, they end up making all the "higher" ground at the top of the play area, and the lower ground below it. This allows for easy cheating of faked elevation with "stair" tiles, that really aren't any different than regular tiles. This also prevents the character from becoming totally obscured by the higher ground if they are walking on a lower level behind it.

Of course, this works fine and great, but you can never have higher elevation below you on the screen. It seems kind of cheesy though. ("Wait, let me guess... the mountains are NORTH of here.. right?") and actually prevents you from displaying many terrains you may want to have in your game. What if your terrain is procedurally created? Obviously one solution is to just use 3D so you can spin the view around, but are there other good 2d workarounds?







This has always bugged the heck out of me, and I wanted to get some good brainstorming going on this. Of course, there are probably other solutions to this issue that exist that I don't know about, you can steal those and post them here too

[Seth]

heh, this always bugged me too.  A similar issue: doors are always located at the south wall.

[RadLab]

Ultima Online allows the use of a "Circle of transparency" wish makes invisible static tiles hiding the area around your character, fluently.

Another solution would be to have each tile drawn from all points of view and give the player the ability to switch between those.

[astrospoon]

That Ultima online trick sounds pretty hot Though it could get a bit confusing. Kind of similar to the whole Super Mario Sunshine Silhouette trick, but of course, more helpful because you can see crap around you too...

[Mikademus]

See this thread, Presentation (cavalier, isometric and 3/4TD projection), on Bay12. Some examples of what's discussed:

[Traveller]

Gahh.  When I try to actually make sense of Zelda's perspective by looking at it closely, it makes me claw my eyes out.  Especially if you picture a pillar, made of the same stuff as Mikademus's zelda pic's walls instead of a sprite, in the middle of the room.  That can turn into Lovecraftian geometric nightmare fuel.

[Xion]

I don't think there is any proper way to make something elevated to the south without obscuring what is to the north while keeping a constant POV without it looking completely ridiculous or slightly diculous. If there were I think it'd've been done by now.

[Ivan]

This type of isometric projection makes me nauseous just looking at a screenshot. I can't imagine actually playing a game like that.

[astrospoon]

This type of isometric projection makes me nauseous just looking at a screenshot. I can't imagine actually playing a game like that.

Agreed. It is pretty friggen brutal.

@Xion: I figured as much, at least with just choosing a perspective. But I do think there could be some neat work-arounds that just weren't commonly used on 2d games of the past. IE: Creative use of transparency, being able to redraw the scene from any of the 4 cardinal directions on the fly etc.. Or even some easy but neat looking cheats for indicating, say, a north facing door, or whatever.

I feel like using a bunch of tricks like this that a workable 2d engine could be made that can show any sort of terrain in any location that you wanted. I'm actually coding a few ideas for fun now, so hopefully I can actually make some progress on this too

[Mikademus]

This type of isometric projection makes me nauseous just looking at a screenshot. I can't imagine actually playing a game like that.

Heh, Ultima VII was quite popular you know... And if we should get technical, that projection isn't isometric, it is cavalier. This is what isometric projection (which is "is a method of visually representing three-dimensional objects in two dimensions, in which the three coordinate axes appear equally foreshortened and the angles between any two of them are 120°") looks like:



Another pilfered image that might be of interest:

[Ivan]

All I know is that looking at that screenshot for more than 10 seconds makes me wanna hurl.

[rogerlevy]

Considering the problem, you might as well make the graphics be:

- 3D polygons with structural things - mountains, buildings, walls.
- 2D "billboard" sprites with animated or scenery objects - people, bushes, items.  use Doom-style angles with simple animation, and limit to fixed angles with more complex animation.

Then you can play with the camera and set the view to whatever is best for each scene or location.

[Pishtaco]

The most interesting way of projecting 3d things into 2d that I've seen recently was in cactus' entry for the Lovecraft competition:



This both shows you the faces of the things around you in a 3d-ish way, and comes with a built-in way of showing you an overworld map at the same time. It's not really clear how you would deal with something on the scale of mountains. As a first, crappy, idea, I would be tempted to: have them as little sprites on the overworld map; then have them as big sprites when they get on to the "horizon" around you, which sink into the ground as you get very close to them; and not to worry about showing physical elevation changes on the small-scale stuff that you actually walk over, but instead showing elevation by the palette and the type of vegetation around you.

[astrospoon]

Nice. This is like a much slicker variation of the old "Zelda" perspective in the dungeons, where you can see the face of every wall. I like I like! 

[Mikademus]

All I know is that looking at that screenshot for more than 10 seconds makes me wanna hurl.

Yeah, I think unfortunately you have a point. I loved Ultima VII but even though it was INCREDIBLY beautiful for its time (it required a 486-33 on release at a time when most people still had 386:s or even 286:es!) I think I did so and thought it was beautiful in spite of its graphics, if that makes any sense. I always thought Ulitma VI was the aesthetic pinnacle of the pixel graphics Ultima games.

It was still a very innovative solution though, the U7 cavalier projection, that allowed a faux 3D world while retaining movement at right angles to the screen cardinals (isometric projection requires diagonal movement which is sucky in keypad-controlled games).

And in defence of the style, I think you'd feel differently if you actually played the game. It really plays very well and looks quite breathtaking in action.

[Banov]

Took me a second to comprehend what I was looking at, but damn that's pretty good.  Reminds me of the latest Pokemon game's 3D projection, but exaggerated on an extreme scale.  Looks like it might be hard as hell to program right, though.

[Ivan]

I've played quite a bit of Ultima8 and I loved it. I didn't see any issues with its... less nausea-inducing projection.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

how about just rotating the camera as you walk so up is still up, but like if higher is down as you walk down rotate the camera so it's up instead?