I've already shown that it's possible, just havn't had the time or patience to code the whole thing. The DMAP, Puzzle and Scene file structures are well known enough to make maps with nearly all the features of the existing ones. There's still a few missing parts though.
Basically, if anyone gets as far as actually creating their own map from scratch, it'll probably spark my interest enough to implement the whole thing. I'll make it all open source so people can see how it's done and continue it if I drop out.
A map is just an image, without all the objects on it. (Buildings, trees, bridges, running squirrels et cetera). The easy way to think about it is, anything that your hero will walk on top of is part of the map itself, and anthing that may appear in front of your hero on screen, is a seperate file added afterwards.
Maps are made up of square tiles of equal size. These are usually 256x256px tiles, but some maps use 128x128. If you want to create yourself a map in Photoshop, set your canvas size to a multiple of 256 when you begin. You may want to split a map into several sections and combine them afterwards, since it's slow working with such huge maps in Photoshop.
A tile in game that you walk on is a rhombus measuring 64x32px. One way to texture a tile might be to make a 45x45 square with normal orientation, create your texture, then rotate it 45ｧ and reduce the height to half. You might be able to do it with little loss of quality with a good shearing implementation. Otherwise, you could just paint textures directly onto the canvas, but you might lose some of the isometric look to it. (I'm no graphic artist, so you should know better than me). Terrain heights are I think, 2 pixels per height, and the max jump height is 10? (Need to confirm this...). Oh, I can provide the canvas template - a simple isometric tile grid for you to stick as a background in photoshop to work from.
@Zatoichi: The objects on a map like trees etc are held in .Scene files. The dmap itself sees these coordinates as walkable, or non walkable, doesn't really matter. At the bottom of a dmap file, all information about scenes and extras are held. All scenes have their own access data, which overrides that of the dmap when placed. There's a pretty neat trick you can do with the client, editing a certain value in memory (use CE, TS etc to do it), where you can bring up a scene debugging feature, where all scenes are given a border around the texture, and the "origin tile" is opaque green.
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Anyway, I'm not coding anything more until I see a graphic of a map someone wants to implement.
Basically, if anyone gets as far as actually creating their own map from scratch, it'll probably spark my interest enough to implement the whole thing. I'll make it all open source so people can see how it's done and continue it if I drop out.
A map is just an image, without all the objects on it. (Buildings, trees, bridges, running squirrels et cetera). The easy way to think about it is, anything that your hero will walk on top of is part of the map itself, and anthing that may appear in front of your hero on screen, is a seperate file added afterwards.
Maps are made up of square tiles of equal size. These are usually 256x256px tiles, but some maps use 128x128. If you want to create yourself a map in Photoshop, set your canvas size to a multiple of 256 when you begin. You may want to split a map into several sections and combine them afterwards, since it's slow working with such huge maps in Photoshop.
A tile in game that you walk on is a rhombus measuring 64x32px. One way to texture a tile might be to make a 45x45 square with normal orientation, create your texture, then rotate it 45ｧ and reduce the height to half. You might be able to do it with little loss of quality with a good shearing implementation. Otherwise, you could just paint textures directly onto the canvas, but you might lose some of the isometric look to it. (I'm no graphic artist, so you should know better than me). Terrain heights are I think, 2 pixels per height, and the max jump height is 10? (Need to confirm this...). Oh, I can provide the canvas template - a simple isometric tile grid for you to stick as a background in photoshop to work from.
@Zatoichi: The objects on a map like trees etc are held in .Scene files. The dmap itself sees these coordinates as walkable, or non walkable, doesn't really matter. At the bottom of a dmap file, all information about scenes and extras are held. All scenes have their own access data, which overrides that of the dmap when placed. There's a pretty neat trick you can do with the client, editing a certain value in memory (use CE, TS etc to do it), where you can bring up a scene debugging feature, where all scenes are given a border around the texture, and the "origin tile" is opaque green.
[Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...]
Anyway, I'm not coding anything more until I see a graphic of a map someone wants to implement.
