FreeGameDev

Hi,

I have a question about Flare's assets. As far as I know, with an isometric engine you cannot use oversized tiles. You have to cut them vertically into multiple stripes, and place them independently on the map so that the overall structure will display depth-correctly.

For example, in the art source, grassland.png you can see that with the house, but not with the ruined tower and underground entrance.

Under the Tiled sources, grassland_structures.png, we can see that both the ruined tower and the underground entrance has been cut into vertical pieces, just like the house (which was already). Does this mean we have to place those stripes independently on the map using Tiled? And if so, what's going on with rottentower.png, which is defined as one single huge tile? Who is going to cut that and when?

So I guess what I'm asking is,
1. when should be the cutting done? When exported from blender (like with the house)? When converted to Tiled sources (like with the entrance)? Is it done by the engine automatically (like with the rottentower, or is it)?
2. if the tiles are already cut in the Tiled source, can we still place them at once with Tiled? I've seen no automap rules for that, but maybe I just missed.

Cheers,
bzt

I think you will have better luck asking on the official FlareRPG IRC channel or the forum on OGA.

Yeah, I've tried but I couldn't reg on OGA because my firewall complains about XSS vulnerabilities and disables js... The page itself works like a charm without js, just not the registration.
Maybe would be someone kind enough to proxy my question?

Edit: man, I've added exception rules temporarily to my L7 firewall, I could reg on OGA, but posting still doesn't work, even if I enable js... I had to enter html code... What a mess. That's what happens when people who take privacy seriously meet with people don't care or know nothing about... I'd say phpBB is lightyears better. It might be not looking great, but at least it works for privacy-concerned people too (and it has a "Preview" feature :-) ).

Cheers,
bzt

The OGA page is a hot mess, that's why it hasn't been updated properly for years. Some highly customized old Drupal version.

I tried convincing the admins over there to at least switch to an external forum software, but they insists to keep everything monolithic. Of course, my preferred option to run a Flarum forum for OGA as well would not go down too well with the nojs crowd either

P.S.: idle a bit on IRC, I think dorkster will be able to answer your question.

At least with Flare, there is no requirement to slice tiles in such a way. Big tiles are also not sliced at runtime. The origin of the tile is at the bottom middle (see the X/Y offset values in the tile definition), so the draw order ends up correct.

The only reason I know for slicing big tiles was that at some point Tiled could not have multiple tile sizes in the same tileset. So mixing small tiles and big tiles in the same tileset required making all tile slices the same size.

If any slicing is to be done, it's done in Blender. The slices are then rendered out as separate tiles.

There are no automap rules for sliced tiles (we only use automapping for basic map layout with set_rules.png). You may want to look into Tiled's "tile stamp" feature if you want to create some multi-tile stamps to easily place.