Seems I must retract my statement. XCOM at least does indeed have different tiles with walkability at different heights. It’s been ages since I played Final Fantasy Tactics and you might be right about it as well. Creating Arches you can walk under is certainly possible in my system, but not if the top of the arches are walkable. In the XCOM mothership and UFOs tiles directly above or below one another are used very sparingly, and the height maps are usually just smartly designed. That’s what came to mind when you asked.
In other levels it’s used a lot, though. The warehouse and city levels are obvious examples, with most roofs and interiors walkable. I was wrong about this, which is a bit embarrasing considering how much I’ve played XCOM I’ll push it up on my todo-list for sure. Adding complex height maps it will take some time, and modifying camera settings/visibility etc. will take more time, but I’ll get it done.
No, that wouldn’t work properly. I need to first implement a way for the separate grids to communicate. I’ve already thought up a few ways I can solve this in the time since your previous post, so I’m confident I can get it working. For now you’ll have to make levels with non-walkable roofs, and I’ll try to set it up so that walkability can be added easily to roofs in a not too distant update. Thanks for bringing this up, by the way. XCOM is my biggest inspiration for the system, and I want to implement all its most important features (including cover, destructible terrain etc.) in time.
I’m using this time waiting to work on my stat/combat/calculations. I’m quite eager to get rolling with the toolkit! (The price point you’ve chosen seems fair for the amount of content I’ve seen thus far, btw)
I’m very interested in your work and I’m following you since the beginning of old topic.
Can’t really wait to hands on it
BTW, I want to put my two coins on how you could manage multi-level grids in a multi floor building/dungeon environment: just think at very old games where to reach an above or below floor you have to “warp” from a special tile to another special tile of above/below floor (for example, stairs entry point or elevator).
In this way maybe you can’t shoot at enemy downstairs, but surely you can travel from/to above/below floors and manage them separately during gameplay.
Thanks for the input, ! That’s certainly one way to do it, and could be done quite easily as well. However, I do want pawns to be able to attack and see pawns and tiles on other levels, which as you rightly point out would not work with such a solution. There are numerous ways to allow for variable height, and while some of them would be easy to implement I want to make sure I choose one that is both efficient and useful. A goal I’ve had throughout making the toolkit is having it flexible, modular, efficient and intuitive. I want this to hold true for having multiple levels as well, and so I’m currently testing multiple solutions and am trying to find the optimal one.
If you reach the point to have a complex management of a multi-floor level situation it will be of course the best solution
Anyway, I want to ask you a question: is your system ready to put some custom logic on cell adjacency?
For example, in my project I want troops joining together (or have symbiosis) in a special 3x3 formation when they are close enough and act as one big troop with increased stats.
Is it possible with your system to calculate adjacency efficiently at any time?
Yes, that’s certainly possible. Just use Find Tiles In Range function with a range of one and set it to check for friendly pawns on the returned indexes. Increase stats if friendlies are found. Find Tiles in Range is very fast at so small ranges. Finding and checking for visibility to all nodes within 2 tiles (25 nodes) takes 0.05 milliseconds on my computer. Even checking all nodes within fifty tiles of a pawn (10201 nodes in total) only takes about 15 milliseconds.
Editing: This can even be made twice as fast if you only care about whether the pawns are within range and not whether the visibility to them is blocked.
Something to think about as you’re building whatever will let pawns occupy the same space at separate heights. Having it so that a function of picking up a character could be useful for some games. One of my favorites, the Disgaea series, allows for all sorts of interesting interactions through picking up your party members.
That’s a bit too gameplay specific for what I’m making so I won’t be adding such feature directly I can help you in adding it yourself if you want that mechanic, though. I don’t think you’d even need true height differences to make something like what you picture possible. They are all standing on the same tile, so just make a custom pawn that represents several pawns stacked together and treat it as a single unit.
I’ll push it up on my todo-list for sure. Adding complex height maps it will take some time, and modifying camera settings/visibility etc. will take more time, but I’ll get it done.
