Isometric engine

No more orthogonal maps, CRP has gone isometric!

City Road Prototype has gone isometric!

Old 2D orthogonal map from v0.0.1

This isometric map looks a thousand times better than my old orthogonal map. Just compare this screenshot above with the one from the previous post. v0.0.1 city was plain 2D, like if you were flying above the city and you looked straight down. Now, my city has got depth, and you can see that some roads are nearer to you than others.

This has some advantages as I may add more features later. For instance, say that I want to add buildings. If I had to render buildings using my old orthogonal system from 0.0.1, you would see buildings from above, so you would see some squares. Using this isometric engine, you would see buildings as 3D boxes, giving the game a better look.

Plus, I've improved my grass texture as you can see. Grass textures are quite easy to do with any advanced image editor like GIMP or Photoshop, just fill your sprite with a solid green color, and then add some noise to make pixels randomly brighter and darker.

However, isometric maps need more processing than orthogonal maps. For instance, I had to remove the road designer, so right now you cannot add or remove road tiles by clicking them. I have to rewrite that feature from scratch. The technical reason behind that is that detecting which tile is the mouse at was easier on v0.0.1: tileX = mouseX / tileWidth, tileY = mouseY / tileHeight. However, things are now harder to do.