| From: | David McMinn |
| Date: | 13 Aug 2001 at 15:35:36 |
| Subject: | [amiga-c] Re: isometric gfx engine |
Hi Ilkka,
> Just because i'm curious, can anyone point any good isometric gfx engine
> which is fast with OS routines? All generic pc implementations i've seen
> so far seems to run at 1fps on my Amiga :-(
Wow, I was thinking about this last night and now it appears on a mailing
list :) If you find any good info I'd appreciate if you could let me
know. Please? :)
The easiest way, like Andrew said would be to draw everything from back
to front, but IMO that would be wasteful if you have lots of objects
which would obscure things (e.g. buildings in Syndicate). There must be
some trick to it for the speed. Syndicate flies on my 060, and I can't
remember how fast UFO is, but I know it's a bit slower (although
Syndicate only has 8 or 16 colours). But even on the 020, Syndicate was
always a lot faster than UFO.
I guess if the view is always fixed in one direction, you could have some
special flags for some tiles, e.g. for making them solid, but not to
display. Could be useful for say the backs of objects which would never
be seen, but 'physically' have to be there.
You could also make the tiles square instead of isometric, which might
allow you to blit them directly without having to mask out the angles in
the corners. See the attached PNG, the image on the left shows 4 tiles in
an isometric view (which would require masking at the corners). The one
on the right shows what I mean about making the tiles square. Hope it's
clear enough to understand :)
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