Z ordering issues - tiledquickplugin

[bjorn (Thorbjørn Lindeijer)]

Regarding the depth, I think this related to the following recent topic:

Half Height Isometric Maps

I’m trying to make isometric maps like the “Tactics” series of games. In general these games vertically separated tiles at about half height compared to the ground plane. I’ve been able to simulate this in a very hacky way: I set the map grid to 16x8 I am using 32x24 “Half Height Blocks” I only place tiles every other grid placement [image] This seems to work, but I lose a lot of the benefits of using Tiled! Is there a better way to do this? I think if I were able to offset layers by an amou…

Essentially the fix would be to render each tile column, instead of rendering each tile layer and then each tile individually. That way, the walls would be already rendered by the time the tile columns that should be rendered over them are drawn.

This is currently not supported by the tiledquickplugin, and with the way it is set up with an item per layer it is not easily changed. The easiest way would probably be to copy the code and then to modify it so that a TileLayerItem receives a list of layers that it will process one tile stack at a time. This will then also mean either not relying on mRenderer->drawTileLayer to draw each layer, or to also “fork” that code and modify it as well to take a list of layers which can then be processed in its inner loop.

A real fix would probably be similar to the way we added the RenderTileCallback, in that we separate the responsibilities further. What we would need, is a function that iterates tile locations in rendering order (like drawTileLayer does), but rather than directly drawing the tiles, it could call a callback in which you can then render all tiles from a certain location, instead of drawing only the tiles from a single layer.

Potentially, we can just make our existing RenderTileCallback less specific. Instead of taking the cell, position and size as parameters, it could only take the tile coordinates and the pixel coordinates. At the same time, this more generic drawTileLayer function would no longer take a TileLayer*, but just the rectangle of the area that needs to be rendered.

@mitch

Doing it this way makes creating artwork – specifically making everything tile properly – much easier, so I would like to keep doing it this way. Is there a way to do this with Tiled? If not, what would I need to do to make it possible? Some kind of plugin or something?

Hmm, I’m not sure what could be done here. I would suggest to generate a regular tileset based on your system, so that you can use them in Tiled.