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[Sean Mirrsen]

Speaking of which, an isometric view doesn't have to look 45 degrees down. A lot of problems can be avoided by using a sharper angle.

[Mike Mayday]

Speaking of which, an isometric view doesn't have to look 45 degrees down. A lot of problems can be avoided by using a sharper angle.

Actually... http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=27508.msg334954#msg334954

[Mike Mayday]

OK, here's the second mockup. The situation I'm trying to depict is as follows:

And here's how it looks:

As you can see, both clever and clean are causing trouble- the red and blue lines should form one straight line.

[Neonivek]

Wow, Alter/Fatwall is starting to pull ahead.

[Vattic]

Alter/Fatwall is still my favourite if isometric graphics are to be used. I know its a problem having things partially obscured and I know its been mentioned before but there are ways around that, having walls that obscure view cut in height, having the hidden parts of things obscured show through like shadows or outlines and rotatable views are just some of the ways round this.

Nice mockups, certainly food for thought.

[Mike Mayday]

Ok then, if all are in favour, I'll stick to fatwall for the remaining mockups. How about some transparency? Every sprite gets a round "halo" with a diameter twice as big as the sprite (so a 32x32px dwarf sprite gets a 64px halo with maximal falloff (Photoshop's hardness)). Every obscuring wall gets ereased with this halo:


This would be, of course, a toggleable effect.

[Volfram]

That might work well with a wider circle and a faster falloff.  Something like the bubbles in SSB.

[Lap]

I like the transparency. One thing that might need to be switched is that the fatwalls should become clever or clean walls depending on the material. If you were above ground walking around a human town, I'm sure some of the walls would make more sense not being a huge square thick. Might be too much work to care though.

Honestly, playing X-Com and other tactical shooters that had varying terrain levels, I was very satisfied with being able to see everything I needed and being able to easily switch layers.

[Vattic]

The halo of transparency seems to work fairly well. Not to seem pushy but are you going to mockup some of the other solutions to this problem? if not I'll happily do some myself.

[Mike Mayday]

For now I'm convinced to fatwall I guess, so now I'll do more general mockups (towers, terrains, rooms). Feel free to do the other solutions.
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/~mayday/upload/tests.psd

[Mr Tk]

This is in regards to the halo effect:

Diablo had the same problem with obscuring walls, so it had a couple of different tricks. The one I'm thinking off specifically is that when you moved your mouse curser over an item it would outline the object (so if it was obscured by walls, corpses or spells you could still find it.) This same principle could be applied to the dwarves and items. Walls will obscure them until you mouse over then the halo effect appears.

In Diablo (the Hellfire expansion pack I believe), one of the characters had a detect ability which would outline all objects that could be picked up off the ground rather than just the one you mouse over. Again in having a hot key which would apply the halo effect over all items displayed on the screen.

[Silverionmox]

Different toggleable effects (outlines, shadows, lower walls, halo, etc. ) tied to hotkeys would solve most problems regarding visibility, and allow every player to make their own compromise between clarity of the interface and verisimilitude.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Kinda like was done in early isometric RTS games like Age of Empires.

[bjlong]

Not that I know how to fix it, but the transparency mockup made me think for a minute that the dwarf is floating above the wall. Possibly make the fall-off quicker, or the bubble smaller?

[Tormy]

How about some transparency?

It's a must-have feature on my list.