Isometric and Tiled

[brettsaunders21]

I am fairly new to ECS and artemis odb and am trying to create an isometric game. Im not completely sure how best to go about it with rendering and storing of the isometric world.

I saw in the Jam package that there is a Tiled map section for loading maps and operations. I was wondering if I could use this to build an isometric map on Tiled and use that to render it. The documentation is sparse on this wiki, but wasn't sure about the way it gets property "entity"? Do I need to create a map in a certain way so that it is stored as an entity instead of the normal format as its ECS.

[DaanVanYperen]

I'd use the Jam package exclusively to grab some ideas from, it's fairly rough and volatile as is.

When you edit the spritesheet in tiled you can edit properties of tiles. If you add an 'entity' property of type string it'll do the job.

[Namek]

Whatever you do, I don't recommend to create a entity for each tile. Let the RenderSystem pick the only tiles that are needed for rendering by using a camera projection. If you want the System to be stateless you could store whole tilemap in one entity. Only store individual fields if you really need to do it in non-specific order. Otherwise, you would gain nothing but complexity, rendering ordering issues and in some cases worse performance.

[DaanVanYperen]

Good advice, I basically only spawn dynamic elements as entities (doors, enemies, platforms etc) as entities, and the map / collision mask as singleton components.