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Isometric Projection in Game Development

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Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#41

Post by dgb23 »

meiraleal wrote: post #19
MrGilbert wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that, people (at least in my org) resort to ask "ChatGPT" for all sorts of questions. I don't share that sentiment, but oth, I never had trouble finding what I was looking for using Google. I agree though, it get's tougher with all that walled gardens. I guess I'm becoming the old, grumpy "back in my days, we used Google!" type of guy.

Back in my days, Google worked. Now it is a waste of time. Someone that wants to hold himself to the notion that Google was/is good really looks like someone having issues getting old

Google works very well as an alternative to knowing the exact link to something you already know exists and know how it's named.

But it has become very bad at _discovering_ valuable information.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#42

Post by fouronnes3 »

dgb23 wrote: post #40
codeflo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s awesome. > The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024. This is unfortunately becoming increasingly untrue, as the forums where stuff like that was posted are rotting away, and Google’s advertisement optimized result ranking neglects the long tail. And to the extent it is still true, it’s because pioneers like you figured it out and shared their results!

I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this. I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past: - There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before. - The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller. - Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.) It's extreme…

I agree with your observations. The time is just right for a Google search killer. There might be some AI in it, but the fundamental goal should be a massive increase of the SNR of search results.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#43

Post by moomin »

adastra22 wrote: post #7
atan2 wrote: post #4

Gustavo is one of the best math and programming teachers out there imo. I am currently taking the Playstation course and it's so much fun.

My daughter (12) is interested in learning coding. I think making games might be a way to keep her interested. Do you think his courses would be too advanced for a teen?

My kid did a Minecraft coding group. It started with a mod that had a rollercoaster on it. They taught you how to to modify it in exercises. My kid tapped out pretty fast, I came to the conclusion they liked Minecraft, but the experience of coding it was a whole other matter.

Ironically, when I was a kid I used to read the code of computer games out of curiosity and that's exactly what got me into programming.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#44

Post by LiveTheDream »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #42
dgb23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this. I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past: - There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before. - The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller. - Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.) It's extreme…

I agree with your observations. The time is just right for a Google search killer. There might be some AI in it, but the fundamental goal should be a massive increase of the SNR of search results.

For me, this has been perplexity.ai. Give it a query, it expands that into multiple queries (possibly chained depending on results) and synthesizes the results into an answer with citations.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#45

Post by bob1029 »

qingcharles wrote: post #2

I developed the isometric engine for this[0] video game in the 90s. I remember trying to figure out the algorithm to determine where the cursor was (converting screen x/y to position on tile, taking into account height of tile stack and the fact the tiles could be transparent) was a monstrous headache for some reason. The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024. The 2D tiles were rendered out of 3…

I've been prototyping an isometric browser game, and the approach I took was to draw an explicit interactive grid of divs on top of the isometric tiles with CSS affine transforms to get each to fit its respective tile surface dimensions. OnHover, et. al. follow this transform perfectly.

It took me a while to get the transform figured out, but once you do you are basically done for an entire tile set. This is also robust to vertical/horizontal overflow of tile art. The browser gives you reasonable ways to get at the various coordinate systems. You can either take the screen space coords directly or inverse transform them to get the orthographic (i.e. purely top-down) tile coords.

Modern web browser tech is really something to behold. It's maybe the best game engine if you hold it right. There are some crazy things you can do in the browser in 5 minutes that are completely infeasible everywhere else. For example, what if some of the tiles are x264 video files and not just static PNGs? What if we also mix in tiles that are drawn using webgl/canvas at each frame update? We could have the client itself handle rendering of tiles using scene descriptions received from the server.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#46

Post by einsteinx2 »

red_admiral wrote: post #35
danielheath wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi (I'm a customer) works much the same way google did in 2010 or so.

I looked up Kagi and their sources include "AI" - do you know if one can turn this off?

Yes there’s a toggle to turn it off in settings. It’s a little AI summary box they sometimes show at the top of search results.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#47

Post by js8 »

Animats wrote: post #11
kookamamie wrote: post #8

Most "isometric" games are in fact "dimetric", i.e. follow a projection where 2 horizontal pixels match 1 vertical pixel when tracing straight horizontal or vertical lines.

That is a really clever hack. Who first used it?

AFAIK https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Lore was among the first isometric 3D games, and it used this ratio.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#48

Post by binary132 »

dgb23 wrote: post #40
codeflo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s awesome. > The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024. This is unfortunately becoming increasingly untrue, as the forums where stuff like that was posted are rotting away, and Google’s advertisement optimized result ranking neglects the long tail. And to the extent it is still true, it’s because pioneers like you figured it out and shared their results!

I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this. I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past: - There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before. - The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller. - Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.) It's extreme…

Maybe it would be neat if there was a place online people could hoard, archive, and share their link troves. I know I’d be interested in that. A lot of this type of content becomes unmaintained and rots badly.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#49

Post by dgb23 »

binary132 wrote: post #48
dgb23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this. I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past: - There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before. - The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller. - Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.) It's extreme…

Maybe it would be neat if there was a place online people could hoard, archive, and share their link troves. I know I’d be interested in that. A lot of this type of content becomes unmaintained and rots badly.

I like the idea of collaborative curation of quality web sources. I think it's a fundamentally hard problem, but my hunch is that many people do this anyway in some form or another.

Re: Isometric Projection in Game Development

#50

Post by Waterluvian »

Can anyone name an isometric 2D-rendered game they swear was 3D. Or a 3D game they swear was actually 2D? For some reason I find these most interesting.

I could look up the answer but I swear Bastion is entirely 2D. Though the characters might be 3D models constrained to certain angles.

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