Wow, I opened a can of worms and then went to bed. That's a pretty stunning map Vry!
First off - an apology.
I am a cretin (and was also a little unsober having come back from a friends leaving do). I gave you all the wrong ratios. The correct settings to get an iso map are:
1. rotate 45 degrees (I got this right at least)
2. squash vertically by 57.73%
This should give a bit more head room on those squares. My aopoliges for screwing that up.
@nwelte1: created both maps from scratch in Gimp - a free image editor. It can easily take a layer, rotate it and squash it. I then did a bit of psot work on the iso map to make the chasm look 3D. The file I pointed to above will load into b31 if you save it somewhere and load it straight in as a campaign. When you say 'it won't load' can you give some more information?
@Vry: The VBL shouldn't be too much of an issue on that map. I'd just lay the lines of VBL where the walls touch the ground.
So there are a few issues that currently don't work with an iso map in maptool.
The grid:
@snikle: We don't need any fancy grid setting system. It is just a diamond pattern (see mine and Vry's maps) that can be set just like the square or hex patterns we currently have. It's possible to go without for the time being, but really it is needed for light - and to a lesser extent area of effect spells - but these can still be drawn in by hand.
@Jector: You are dead right. As the vision comes directly from the centre of the image, it is out of kilter for iso. You'll see that the area my elf can see is actually different in the two maps above, even though he is standing in the same square. I think this might be possible to work around with the current settings, but of curse the ideal setting would be for maptool to undertand that the image stands on a diamond square base and that vision comes from the centre of that. This is essentially the same practical question of calculating vision for a token with a huge pike that overhangs his square. It all depends on how you define the square base of a large image. This shouldn't be too tricky to fix/workaround?
Right, they are the easy ones. The tricky ones are really endemic to iso views. Firstly, transparency and iso objects. Best way to understand this is play Diablo. All items you find on the ground are smaller than a character - therefore you can always see your token (sprite). All walls are larger - and go transparent when you are behind them. That's going to be a living nightmare to code in I would assume. However, it would be possible to have walls as objects. They can be solid as people walk up to them, and as they walk past them the GM can hide them, perhaps just leaving their footprint drawn on the map.
Note - DDI has not shown any 3D walls, just 2D floorplans rotated to an iso view with a couple of 3D tokens dropped on it. And people are falling over themselves to call it pretty. There's not a huge amount of eye candy required to impress people.
Hmm, that starts a thought. Those dungeon tiles on the DDi vidoe trailer are on general release - it would be pretty straightforward to mock up a similar trailer with the same tiles in maptool and show a person walking through a dungeon - but with dynamic FOW! ... and for free! ... not to mention - already available.... Just a thought
There are two things that remain that are going to be a problem. Firstly z-ordering of images. If my elf is standing further forward than your goblin, then the image of his head should be over the image of the goblin's feet. That's fine, I just use Arrange -> Move to top to make sure my elf token is above your goblin. However when my elf moves round behind your goblin, then we need the goblin image to be on top. This can be done by using Arrange->bring to fron on the goblin image, but this kind of avoids the issue that this will bring the goblin on top of every other token and item on the map. You almost certainly don't need that.
To take this one step further - consider objects. Now they are currently on the object layer, and so behind all tokens. Think how weird that's going to look when your barbarian moves behind the sarcophagus and we can still see his feet. No 'Move to back' option here.
This would require maptool to be able to set a tokens z-ordering by the row of the grid the token is on. So people and tokens further up the grid (towards the top of the screen) have a lower z-ordering. The ordering whould drop one for every row they go up. If two things are on the same row, then a token is in front of an object - just like now. There should also be a manual adjustment possible of +/- 1 to z-ordering, so that you can have tokens that do look like they are standing on sarcophagi - because your barbarian decided to jump onto it this time, rather than walk around the back. That adjustment of +/-1 should be able to do all the legwork that 'move to top...' and 'move to bottom...' currently do for top down views.
Finally, there's the VBL issue. Basically, if my elf moves one square further north on the iso image above - his head disappear because it is in VBL. That's a pain. This would be solved by having maptool check - is the token's vision centre in VBL or not? If it is - the player can see the whole image of their token.
I'd like that setting anyway for top down as it would mean that top-down minis wouldn't keep losing their hands/swords/pikes in the walls as they walk around.
So that's my thoughts on the problems of an iso view:
1. The grid
2. How to make walls look pretty without making it unwieldy - and note that DDi doesn't look like it's going to have 3D walls at all.
3. How to deal with sensible z-ordering
4. tokens (an objects) losing their upper sections in VBL.
Hope those thoughts are useful to people.
/stirs the can of worms
