Qiso v1.1 almost release-ready... Not long left to get the $5 deal ;-)

Corona Marketplace Marketplace Announcements
#1

We’re almost ready to release v1.1 of our Qiso isometric engine and will be lifting the temporary price reduction back up to $15 when we do, so if you haven’t already purchased and you’re thinking of doing, you might want to grab now ;-). Hoping to get this release uploaded within the next few hours but we’ve still some testing to do first.

The upcoming release brings support for Tiled Editor’s “infinite” map size, support for negative tile positions, and support for maps that contain ‘holes’ between areas of land. All of which means making immensely large, oddly shaped maps or extending maps over time without affecting player positions etc is now possible. I’ll be writing an article soon about how huge maps can be designed and served from server to device in chunks allowing for seamless map traversal on devices with limited memory capacity.

This release also adds layer opacity triggered when entering or leaving tiles, allowing for roofs to be turned invisible when walking into buildings, walls to be turned semi-transparent when walking behind them, and an easier mechanic for opening and closing doors when passing through. Again I’ll be writing an article to better explain this.

#2

v1.1 now pushed to the marketplace and awaiting approval. Documentation is updated and the following test build shows the new layer visibilities system in action (walk through the building).

https://development.qweb.co.uk/html5/qiso/

As per https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/73679-touch-event-bug/ please be aware of a touch screen bug in HTML builds that might prevent that demo from working properly on Windows based touch devices or Android below version 8.1.

#3

Very cool

#4

+1000 for streaming maps.

I suppose this is subjective, but a fadeout (maybe to low alpha rather than invisible) on the roofs / etc. might be nice.

Out of curiosity, are you doing or planning anything with height? Either in the elevation sense (e.g. Designer City 2, X-COM, Tactics Ogre, etc.), or platforming (Head Over Heels, Solstice / Equinox, Super Mario RPG, Landstalker, etc.).

#5

Transparency is possible too. I’ll rig up another demo shortly =)

Elevation is planned, but heavily debated at this end currently. Long story short I want to be able to add custom properties to tilesets, (a lot of this is custom property based to minimise how much code is needed in setting up maps), that define the elevation of each ground tile so that when a character walks over that type of tile, it can climb/fall to the right level. But firstly there’s then debate over whether this should also affect the position other layers of that tile are drawn at or whether it should be left to the designer to render out alternate tile sprites accordingly, and secondly both my partner and some of our designers feel that isometric games that contain hills are just too difficult to navigate, especially when movement is click based like in Qiso. Build-em-up games like Designer City don’t have to worry about that because you’re only moving a camera and blueprints of buildings around as opposed to characters that need telling to walk to a specific tile, but although those kinds of games are totally possible in Qiso, the pathfinding and character handling are what Qiso is strongest at.

#6

New demo:

https://development.qweb.co.uk/html5/qiso/

Walk around the buildings to see a few different transparency effects.

  • When inside the north building the roof turns transparent.

  • When inside the west building the roof and walls turn transparent.

  • When inside the south building the roof hides and the walls turn transparent

  • When inside the east building the roof hides.

I got a little lazy creating the map for this and only used two sets of layers, hence the roofs of two buildings being attached and the walls of two buildings being attached. In some games this might be the desired effect, but in others you’d want to keep the buildings separate - just a case of creating more layers within Tiled so that each building has its own roof and wall layers. Similarly I kept the door layers separate to everything else in this demo but those could turn transparent too if desired.

Currently if you created a bunch of NPCs and left them to walk around randomly, the same transparency triggers would hit when those characters go in and out of buildings too. I’ll be adding a function to disable that soon.

#7

v1.1 now pushed to the marketplace and awaiting approval. Documentation is updated and the following test build shows the new layer visibilities system in action (walk through the building).

https://development.qweb.co.uk/html5/qiso/

As per https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/73679-touch-event-bug/ please be aware of a touch screen bug in HTML builds that might prevent that demo from working properly on Windows based touch devices or Android below version 8.1.

#8

Very cool

#9

+1000 for streaming maps.

I suppose this is subjective, but a fadeout (maybe to low alpha rather than invisible) on the roofs / etc. might be nice.

Out of curiosity, are you doing or planning anything with height? Either in the elevation sense (e.g. Designer City 2, X-COM, Tactics Ogre, etc.), or platforming (Head Over Heels, Solstice / Equinox, Super Mario RPG, Landstalker, etc.).

#10

Transparency is possible too. I’ll rig up another demo shortly =)

Elevation is planned, but heavily debated at this end currently. Long story short I want to be able to add custom properties to tilesets, (a lot of this is custom property based to minimise how much code is needed in setting up maps), that define the elevation of each ground tile so that when a character walks over that type of tile, it can climb/fall to the right level. But firstly there’s then debate over whether this should also affect the position other layers of that tile are drawn at or whether it should be left to the designer to render out alternate tile sprites accordingly, and secondly both my partner and some of our designers feel that isometric games that contain hills are just too difficult to navigate, especially when movement is click based like in Qiso. Build-em-up games like Designer City don’t have to worry about that because you’re only moving a camera and blueprints of buildings around as opposed to characters that need telling to walk to a specific tile, but although those kinds of games are totally possible in Qiso, the pathfinding and character handling are what Qiso is strongest at.

#11

New demo:

https://development.qweb.co.uk/html5/qiso/

Walk around the buildings to see a few different transparency effects.

  • When inside the north building the roof turns transparent.

  • When inside the west building the roof and walls turn transparent.

  • When inside the south building the roof hides and the walls turn transparent

  • When inside the east building the roof hides.

I got a little lazy creating the map for this and only used two sets of layers, hence the roofs of two buildings being attached and the walls of two buildings being attached. In some games this might be the desired effect, but in others you’d want to keep the buildings separate - just a case of creating more layers within Tiled so that each building has its own roof and wall layers. Similarly I kept the door layers separate to everything else in this demo but those could turn transparent too if desired.

Currently if you created a bunch of NPCs and left them to walk around randomly, the same transparency triggers would hit when those characters go in and out of buildings too. I’ll be adding a function to disable that soon.