Isometric Lighting Engine - OUT NOW

Quote from gurglak

Hello again. There has been happening some slight frogress, a short gameplay video:

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At this moment I am struggling to implement smooth scrolling that is not entirely locked on the player. Ive tried the easing object but experience lot of back and forth stutter. IF you have time and some ideas your help would be greatly appreciated.

Cant find the edit button for the life of me. Ah well. EDIT: Since I am already having 900+ objects all the time on screen ( I presume they are tiles) Could it be possible to remove all the tiles acting as ground on 0 Z height? Would that increase performance? although I am running solid 60 fps nowadays pretty fluently. So far I've only resorted into hiding them.

Quote from SolarB

There is only ever FieldSize x Fieldsize tiles, which are then translated to Z height using a value. The height is an illusion created by assigning Z value, therefore all tiles on the plane are necessary. If you are adding tiles the only actives added are walls, and they are dynamically loaded as you move around the array.

From your video (looks good!) it seems that because you are using large tiles and only part of the screen you would be able to take advantage of the included profiles, or create your own using the FieldSize value (set this to something smaller) and the Profiles group under the Init group. This restricts the amount of drawn tiles. Note that with a smaller Fieldsize you must set the FieldOffset and Crop values to center it on screen. To get an idea how this works set the value Profile to 1 or 2. There's also some info about this in the manual.

I will try to do some work on the smooth scrolling.

Oh yes I have been running custom profile. Took some fooling around with the tilesize and fieldsize,offset etc. Its at fieldsize 16 with tiles of 64x64. It only mildly crops at the edges ever so slightly and the play area is now super centered(field offsetx-208,y 166) . The thing I was doing wrong was a huge bunch of inactive light pointers hanging about to account for the amount of objects. And tracking the number of objects with debugger I discovered the number of objects stayed the same regardless of number of drawn tiles ( duh because they are always there like you mentioned.) BUT Im still running 600 objects on screen at all times. This is due to duplicating one of the tile types for usage of foliage and such which are not obstacles. So essentially there is DOUBLE the amount of tiles on top of each other as there should be. Some how I cant edit the forum posts always so I felt like i shouldn't post a third one in a row.. As far as the scrolling goes I would be very glad to get a smoother camera I am even willing to pay If it is too much of a hassel and your up for the task (because i cant figure it out). Thanks again for responding and your kind words on the video + your multiple advices. Couldn't do this without your help!

SolarB, I've been looking for an engine a lot like this one :3 it might serve my needs if there were two slight changes i could make:

1. The first is the ability to change the size of the collision between the character and obstacles. For instance, I have tiles that are 360 in size, but my character is far from that wide. The size of the character only takes up around 64 pixels of that large 360 space. The way the engine is now, the character collides well with the bottom left and bottom right sides of the walls, but when moving behind it (top left and or top right), the character collides with the obstacles substantially farther away. I realize it is because the engine only understands the base size of each 'grid' coordinate to be whatever I set it to (in this case the tiles' sizes - 360), but the character is nowhere near that size. Is there a way to solve this?

2. The size of the lighting. While I understand that the lighting is dependent on the tiles themselves, is there any way to change the size or shape of the lighting effect? Like for instance if i wanted to use the shape of a floor tile (a diamond), can the effect itself be scaled down?

I have no problems at all providing concept screenshots of these examples to give you a visual representation of what I want to achieve

Quote from ffomega

SolarB, I've been looking for an engine a lot like this one :3 it might serve my needs if there were two slight changes i could make:

1. The first is the ability to change the size of the collision between the character and obstacles. For instance, I have tiles that are 360 in size, but my character is far from that wide. The size of the character only takes up around 64 pixels of that large 360 space. The way the engine is now, the character collides well with the bottom left and bottom right sides of the walls, but when moving behind it (top left and or top right), the character collides with the obstacles substantially farther away. I realize it is because the engine only understands the base size of each 'grid' coordinate to be whatever I set it to (in this case the tiles' sizes - 360), but the character is nowhere near that size. Is there a way to solve this?

2. The size of the lighting. While I understand that the lighting is dependent on the tiles themselves, is there any way to change the size or shape of the lighting effect? Like for instance if i wanted to use the shape of a floor tile (a diamond), can the effect itself be scaled down?

I have no problems at all providing concept screenshots of these examples to give you a visual representation of what I want to achieve

I think you can affect the collision size with halfsize and halfvert of the player. And moving the hotspot to adjust where the collision appears to be happening

As far as the lightning goes to my understanding you will have to set a smaller tile size if you want more smooth lightning

Hi I bought the plug-in and I’m looking at the manual but I don’t see installation instructions. What do I do with all of the different files? I’m not sure what to put where

I have a new issue Never mind about the installation. I go into the frame called editor and I select the ground with my cursor but when I left click nothing happens any ideas as to why? I looked in the events and the conditioner for placing a block when left click is still there so it should work

I also tried shift and control left click And I can’t place lights either

Did you move the z plane upwards so you can place a tile? with mouse scroll and hold ctrl if I remeber correct.

I really like this and I'd love to use it but does this engine work with a simple 2D platformer game? Maybe I don't fully understand it.

Interesting stuff...

Quote from SolarB

Hi all!

The Isometric Lighting Engine is finally out!

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There will be a LAUNCH SALE for one month until July for 30% off!

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This open-source example is an engine and level editor for the creation of three dimensional scenes and levels. With this engine you can easily build any type of isometric game and add powerful dynamic lighting. The engine in it's base form is high-performance, uses no extensions** or shaders and supports all runtimes***. It is scalable and includes a complete tool kit allowing for user defined parameters such as tile size, the ability to easily work with your own tilesets, adjustable light ranges, custom movement and more.

Features:
- Dynamic 3D lighting and shadows
- Dynamic tile loading
- 3D platform movement example with customisable controls
- Level editor with load and save
- Simple interface
- Includes a pathfinding example for multiple objects

The core engine is <40 events, clearly presented and fully commented along with a fully illustrated manual so implementing it in your own projects is a breeze!

Please read the attached manual for features and limitations and see if the Isometric Lighting Engine is for you. Any feedback is most welcome.

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* Some tiles shown here and in the video are from opengameart.org and are not included.
** UltimateFullscreen, Pathfinding object and Surface object must be installed to open but can be removed
*** For lighting HWA must be supported

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Hello again. My old computer is not working anymore. I made backup ups regularly on cloud and usb drive. So I now have windows 10 and fresh install of fusion on my new machine. Problem is I cant get the old levels to load with in the editor, however if I make a new level and save it it will load. Would the newer operating system or fusion version have an effect?

The tiles do not appear in the pathfinding scene, I cannot see the backdrop, only the players and the collisions are made on invisible obstacles. Without having changed anything. I presume this is a compatibility issue. Please tell me if you have encountered this problem.

In the engine scene, should there be something? (demo.arr)

I only see the player.

If I load a file that I myself saved from the editor, nothing appears but there are collisions.

For a future visitor: the problem is with the array object. It only loads files that I created and did not move. If I save an array, it shows up.