CaptainBinky

I'm voting for pancakes, but not the type that you have incorrectly used as the example image.

I'm voting for pancakes, but not the type that you have incorrectly used as the example image.

Hi DaChucksta,
 
You have, essentially, two options: draw all your characters yourself, or render them from 3D software. The first way is the most straight-forward but time consuming depending on how many frames of animations / characters you want. The second way faster for pumping out a lot of animations (assuming you're familiar with 3D software) but complicated if you're striving for good quality at low resolutions.
 
If you're going to draw the characters yourself - and any pixel art animation software would suffice - Pro Motion, for example (http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php) - there are a couple of things to consider:
 
A character in isometric perspective really ought to be a little top-down (like in pic A, below).
 

 
However, for simplicity of drawing and animating, you can get away with it being side / front on (like in pic B. It's less ideal, but because in isometric, vertical walls stay vertical it doesn't stand out too badly and makes animating a hell of a lot easier.
 
As far as walls and floors go... your basic isometric shape should be something nice and neat - the diagonals should be across 2 pixels, by 1 up/down:
 

 
Walls in isometric are extremely straight-forward. You can draw the wall as if it were a flat texture, and then just shift every two pixels across up one, and that will then shear the texture into isometric:
 

 
Hope this helps

OH Lookining good,  and it's working. Thanks you really great  

>Heh. I'm guessing in your country, you would write a float in the format 1,00000 rather than 1.00000?
 Actually so. That what I've got:
testObject.txt
Thank you very much. 

I hate it how whenever you guys post a Mondoid (Tuesdoid?) some frakker has to put in "NPC" in the comments. 
It makes me wanna paste Lemmy101's post about the NPC's into my Project Zomboid review, and write in support of it, then request the PZ community to "find this review helpful"so it raises to the top of the steam review section, so people can stop being robots about the NPC thing. How isit that Subnautica can be completely devoid of NPC's, but it's a total crime that PZ doesn't? 
 
 
Oh...look. 
 
I just wrote a review:     
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Vyn_Halcyon/recommended/108600
 
Let's cut our Indie boyz some slack, shall we? 

I think we would all agree that we would prefer it if the text we wrote about the game, its current state, its planned features, and all the other stuff - text which we were deliberately open about to attempt to prevent issues precisely like this one - did not require clicking "read more" on a box in order to see. But that's the way the Steam Store page is set up, so that's the way it is. Levelling this specific criticism at us as opposed to Valve and the way they designed the store for early access games is a little unfair on this particular point imo.

I think we would all agree that we would prefer it if the text we wrote about the game, its current state, its planned features, and all the other stuff - text which we were deliberately open about to attempt to prevent issues precisely like this one - did not require clicking "read more" on a box in order to see. But that's the way the Steam Store page is set up, so that's the way it is. Levelling this specific criticism at us as opposed to Valve and the way they designed the store for early access games is a little unfair on this particular point imo.

Here's mine
 

Here's mine
 

Nice ideas so far (apart from the one about buying the game early - I loathe the concept of achievements which are forever locked off from some players).
 
Adding achievements is super low down on our list of priorities at the mo But we'll get round to it sooner or later

Well multiplayer games suffer from this generally. You need people on the servers to attract people to the servers, which is a chicken and egg problem
This happens with every multiplayer game which doesn't have the userbase of big games like DayZ, H1Z1, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. If Zomboid sells 3 times what it has so far, then maybe we'd have a shot at super-active servers.
Perhaps it being an Early Access game partly puts people off, partly it being a 2D isometric game, partly it being a hardcore survival game, partly being a long time in development, etc etc etc. There's no simple answer. I hope that once we hit 1.0 we'll see an influx of activity from a lot of our players who've perhaps not played for a while, waiting for it to come out of Early Access.

Well multiplayer games suffer from this generally. You need people on the servers to attract people to the servers, which is a chicken and egg problem
This happens with every multiplayer game which doesn't have the userbase of big games like DayZ, H1Z1, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. If Zomboid sells 3 times what it has so far, then maybe we'd have a shot at super-active servers.
Perhaps it being an Early Access game partly puts people off, partly it being a 2D isometric game, partly it being a hardcore survival game, partly being a long time in development, etc etc etc. There's no simple answer. I hope that once we hit 1.0 we'll see an influx of activity from a lot of our players who've perhaps not played for a while, waiting for it to come out of Early Access.

,
the woes of programming. Add one thing, spend the rest of your life fixing that one thing. Truly a profession for masochists 

Thankyou for being decent and friendly in this thread, by the way - it's appreciated. I was kind of expecting something... different to transpire when I clicked it I hope that we can tempt you into keeping an eye on the game as we roll out updates - each major update tends to cause bursts of activity - so it may not be completely necessary to wait until 1.0
Thanks

Well multiplayer games suffer from this generally. You need people on the servers to attract people to the servers, which is a chicken and egg problem
This happens with every multiplayer game which doesn't have the userbase of big games like DayZ, H1Z1, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. If Zomboid sells 3 times what it has so far, then maybe we'd have a shot at super-active servers.
Perhaps it being an Early Access game partly puts people off, partly it being a 2D isometric game, partly it being a hardcore survival game, partly being a long time in development, etc etc etc. There's no simple answer. I hope that once we hit 1.0 we'll see an influx of activity from a lot of our players who've perhaps not played for a while, waiting for it to come out of Early Access.

Well multiplayer games suffer from this generally. You need people on the servers to attract people to the servers, which is a chicken and egg problem
This happens with every multiplayer game which doesn't have the userbase of big games like DayZ, H1Z1, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. If Zomboid sells 3 times what it has so far, then maybe we'd have a shot at super-active servers.
Perhaps it being an Early Access game partly puts people off, partly it being a 2D isometric game, partly it being a hardcore survival game, partly being a long time in development, etc etc etc. There's no simple answer. I hope that once we hit 1.0 we'll see an influx of activity from a lot of our players who've perhaps not played for a while, waiting for it to come out of Early Access.

Well multiplayer games suffer from this generally. You need people on the servers to attract people to the servers, which is a chicken and egg problem
This happens with every multiplayer game which doesn't have the userbase of big games like DayZ, H1Z1, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. If Zomboid sells 3 times what it has so far, then maybe we'd have a shot at super-active servers.
Perhaps it being an Early Access game partly puts people off, partly it being a 2D isometric game, partly it being a hardcore survival game, partly being a long time in development, etc etc etc. There's no simple answer. I hope that once we hit 1.0 we'll see an influx of activity from a lot of our players who've perhaps not played for a while, waiting for it to come out of Early Access.

This is great!
 
(Just don't load the golf club - it's by far the worst 3D model I have ever made in my life )

Well multiplayer games suffer from this generally. You need people on the servers to attract people to the servers, which is a chicken and egg problem
This happens with every multiplayer game which doesn't have the userbase of big games like DayZ, H1Z1, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. If Zomboid sells 3 times what it has so far, then maybe we'd have a shot at super-active servers.
Perhaps it being an Early Access game partly puts people off, partly it being a 2D isometric game, partly it being a hardcore survival game, partly being a long time in development, etc etc etc. There's no simple answer. I hope that once we hit 1.0 we'll see an influx of activity from a lot of our players who've perhaps not played for a while, waiting for it to come out of Early Access.

Here is the problem we have:
 
In an ideal world, we would simply simulate a million zombies in real-time - they would all move around the map according to what they see and hear, if they're killed, they're dead permanently. Additional zombies would only ever 'migrate' in from the very edges of the map. No approximation would be going on. I think that we can all agree that this would be the perfect way for the game to operate.
 
I think we also intuitively know that such a system would be impossible for a number of reasons - not just the processing required for the A.I or the ridiculous burden on your net connection in multiplayer, but also the fact that the zombies would need to know about parts of the map which aren't streamed in (even if we made the map a fraction of the size it is, parts of it would still not be in memory at any given location). So that's out as a solution, by miles.
 
So. What can we do? How can we get the huge zombie populations that we need to give a satisfying sensation of being in the zombie apocalypse? Well, on some level, we have to cheat, just like all other games do on some level. Again, in an ideal world, you cheat in a manner which looks to the player as if you're not cheating. When you play games with incredibly sophisticated A.I. and oh my God it's so clever and amazing - this is because they cheated in a way in which it wasn't noticeable. Good job! 10/10
 
Now we've got a problem. We're a sandbox game. We need to give the player control over how the game operates. We need to let the player customise their experience. This means exposing the controls to the sandbox settings. Now when we cheat, we need to give you a little box in order to customise that cheat. We need to reveal that there is such a thing as migration and respawning. Without the sandbox options, we could have randomised the respawning a little and simply pretended that what you were seeing was migration. Oh! Those zombies were simulated! They must have heard a noise, wandered over, and that explains why this cleared out area now has some zombies in it. With some incredibly well phrased bullshit, we probably could have convinced a number of people that actually somehow we were able to pull off simulating that ridiculous a number of zombies.
 
The more technical amongst you probably would have smelled bullshit - but you wouldn't be able to say exactly how we were bullshitting.
 
Not so with a sandbox game. We have to expose how it works. There's no way we can bullshit our way out of this. And that means, because you know that respawning is something which happens, you're now in the position of thinking that the only explanation for some zombies being somewhere they shouldn't be is because of respawning - sort of Occam's Razor logic. And it puts us in a position where we're having a discussion in terms of those sandbox options, rather than having a general discussion about how the game feels - completely isolated from number in boxes. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in.
 
Because in an ideal world, all you guys would be talking about how the game feels - and only we developers would be worrying about what numbers go in boxes to make it feel good for you.
 
What can we do about this? Well, we're in Early Access - there's still plenty of room to tweak the actual ways in which respawning happens, when it triggers, all that jazz - to make it feel right. But regardless of what we do, it'll still be exposed in the sandbox settings. We could obfuscate those settings by giving them fairly meaningless names, but that would then make customising sandbox kind of shit - if you're setting options whose effect is unknown.
 
edit: I would also like to mention in this word "cheat" heavy post, that we endevour to cheat as little as possible, obviously. I've banged on about it simply to emphasise the point that it has to happen at some point in this, and almost every game. But the fact that most times, you can see a whopping horde, turn, run off, turn, run back, and there is the same whopping horde shows that we are actually simulating in a non-cheaty way a pretty damn large number of zombies

Here is the problem we have:
 
In an ideal world, we would simply simulate a million zombies in real-time - they would all move around the map according to what they see and hear, if they're killed, they're dead permanently. Additional zombies would only ever 'migrate' in from the very edges of the map. No approximation would be going on. I think that we can all agree that this would be the perfect way for the game to operate.
 
I think we also intuitively know that such a system would be impossible for a number of reasons - not just the processing required for the A.I or the ridiculous burden on your net connection in multiplayer, but also the fact that the zombies would need to know about parts of the map which aren't streamed in (even if we made the map a fraction of the size it is, parts of it would still not be in memory at any given location). So that's out as a solution, by miles.
 
So. What can we do? How can we get the huge zombie populations that we need to give a satisfying sensation of being in the zombie apocalypse? Well, on some level, we have to cheat, just like all other games do on some level. Again, in an ideal world, you cheat in a manner which looks to the player as if you're not cheating. When you play games with incredibly sophisticated A.I. and oh my God it's so clever and amazing - this is because they cheated in a way in which it wasn't noticeable. Good job! 10/10
 
Now we've got a problem. We're a sandbox game. We need to give the player control over how the game operates. We need to let the player customise their experience. This means exposing the controls to the sandbox settings. Now when we cheat, we need to give you a little box in order to customise that cheat. We need to reveal that there is such a thing as migration and respawning. Without the sandbox options, we could have randomised the respawning a little and simply pretended that what you were seeing was migration. Oh! Those zombies were simulated! They must have heard a noise, wandered over, and that explains why this cleared out area now has some zombies in it. With some incredibly well phrased bullshit, we probably could have convinced a number of people that actually somehow we were able to pull off simulating that ridiculous a number of zombies.
 
The more technical amongst you probably would have smelled bullshit - but you wouldn't be able to say exactly how we were bullshitting.
 
Not so with a sandbox game. We have to expose how it works. There's no way we can bullshit our way out of this. And that means, because you know that respawning is something which happens, you're now in the position of thinking that the only explanation for some zombies being somewhere they shouldn't be is because of respawning - sort of Occam's Razor logic. And it puts us in a position where we're having a discussion in terms of those sandbox options, rather than having a general discussion about how the game feels - completely isolated from number in boxes. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in.
 
Because in an ideal world, all you guys would be talking about how the game feels - and only we developers would be worrying about what numbers go in boxes to make it feel good for you.
 
What can we do about this? Well, we're in Early Access - there's still plenty of room to tweak the actual ways in which respawning happens, when it triggers, all that jazz - to make it feel right. But regardless of what we do, it'll still be exposed in the sandbox settings. We could obfuscate those settings by giving them fairly meaningless names, but that would then make customising sandbox kind of shit - if you're setting options whose effect is unknown.
 
edit: I would also like to mention in this word "cheat" heavy post, that we endevour to cheat as little as possible, obviously. I've banged on about it simply to emphasise the point that it has to happen at some point in this, and almost every game. But the fact that most times, you can see a whopping horde, turn, run off, turn, run back, and there is the same whopping horde shows that we are actually simulating in a non-cheaty way a pretty damn large number of zombies

Here is the problem we have:
 
In an ideal world, we would simply simulate a million zombies in real-time - they would all move around the map according to what they see and hear, if they're killed, they're dead permanently. Additional zombies would only ever 'migrate' in from the very edges of the map. No approximation would be going on. I think that we can all agree that this would be the perfect way for the game to operate.
 
I think we also intuitively know that such a system would be impossible for a number of reasons - not just the processing required for the A.I or the ridiculous burden on your net connection in multiplayer, but also the fact that the zombies would need to know about parts of the map which aren't streamed in (even if we made the map a fraction of the size it is, parts of it would still not be in memory at any given location). So that's out as a solution, by miles.
 
So. What can we do? How can we get the huge zombie populations that we need to give a satisfying sensation of being in the zombie apocalypse? Well, on some level, we have to cheat, just like all other games do on some level. Again, in an ideal world, you cheat in a manner which looks to the player as if you're not cheating. When you play games with incredibly sophisticated A.I. and oh my God it's so clever and amazing - this is because they cheated in a way in which it wasn't noticeable. Good job! 10/10
 
Now we've got a problem. We're a sandbox game. We need to give the player control over how the game operates. We need to let the player customise their experience. This means exposing the controls to the sandbox settings. Now when we cheat, we need to give you a little box in order to customise that cheat. We need to reveal that there is such a thing as migration and respawning. Without the sandbox options, we could have randomised the respawning a little and simply pretended that what you were seeing was migration. Oh! Those zombies were simulated! They must have heard a noise, wandered over, and that explains why this cleared out area now has some zombies in it. With some incredibly well phrased bullshit, we probably could have convinced a number of people that actually somehow we were able to pull off simulating that ridiculous a number of zombies.
 
The more technical amongst you probably would have smelled bullshit - but you wouldn't be able to say exactly how we were bullshitting.
 
Not so with a sandbox game. We have to expose how it works. There's no way we can bullshit our way out of this. And that means, because you know that respawning is something which happens, you're now in the position of thinking that the only explanation for some zombies being somewhere they shouldn't be is because of respawning - sort of Occam's Razor logic. And it puts us in a position where we're having a discussion in terms of those sandbox options, rather than having a general discussion about how the game feels - completely isolated from number in boxes. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in.
 
Because in an ideal world, all you guys would be talking about how the game feels - and only we developers would be worrying about what numbers go in boxes to make it feel good for you.
 
What can we do about this? Well, we're in Early Access - there's still plenty of room to tweak the actual ways in which respawning happens, when it triggers, all that jazz - to make it feel right. But regardless of what we do, it'll still be exposed in the sandbox settings. We could obfuscate those settings by giving them fairly meaningless names, but that would then make customising sandbox kind of shit - if you're setting options whose effect is unknown.
 
edit: I would also like to mention in this word "cheat" heavy post, that we endevour to cheat as little as possible, obviously. I've banged on about it simply to emphasise the point that it has to happen at some point in this, and almost every game. But the fact that most times, you can see a whopping horde, turn, run off, turn, run back, and there is the same whopping horde shows that we are actually simulating in a non-cheaty way a pretty damn large number of zombies

Here is the problem we have:
 
In an ideal world, we would simply simulate a million zombies in real-time - they would all move around the map according to what they see and hear, if they're killed, they're dead permanently. Additional zombies would only ever 'migrate' in from the very edges of the map. No approximation would be going on. I think that we can all agree that this would be the perfect way for the game to operate.
 
I think we also intuitively know that such a system would be impossible for a number of reasons - not just the processing required for the A.I or the ridiculous burden on your net connection in multiplayer, but also the fact that the zombies would need to know about parts of the map which aren't streamed in (even if we made the map a fraction of the size it is, parts of it would still not be in memory at any given location). So that's out as a solution, by miles.
 
So. What can we do? How can we get the huge zombie populations that we need to give a satisfying sensation of being in the zombie apocalypse? Well, on some level, we have to cheat, just like all other games do on some level. Again, in an ideal world, you cheat in a manner which looks to the player as if you're not cheating. When you play games with incredibly sophisticated A.I. and oh my God it's so clever and amazing - this is because they cheated in a way in which it wasn't noticeable. Good job! 10/10
 
Now we've got a problem. We're a sandbox game. We need to give the player control over how the game operates. We need to let the player customise their experience. This means exposing the controls to the sandbox settings. Now when we cheat, we need to give you a little box in order to customise that cheat. We need to reveal that there is such a thing as migration and respawning. Without the sandbox options, we could have randomised the respawning a little and simply pretended that what you were seeing was migration. Oh! Those zombies were simulated! They must have heard a noise, wandered over, and that explains why this cleared out area now has some zombies in it. With some incredibly well phrased bullshit, we probably could have convinced a number of people that actually somehow we were able to pull off simulating that ridiculous a number of zombies.
 
The more technical amongst you probably would have smelled bullshit - but you wouldn't be able to say exactly how we were bullshitting.
 
Not so with a sandbox game. We have to expose how it works. There's no way we can bullshit our way out of this. And that means, because you know that respawning is something which happens, you're now in the position of thinking that the only explanation for some zombies being somewhere they shouldn't be is because of respawning - sort of Occam's Razor logic. And it puts us in a position where we're having a discussion in terms of those sandbox options, rather than having a general discussion about how the game feels - completely isolated from number in boxes. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in.
 
Because in an ideal world, all you guys would be talking about how the game feels - and only we developers would be worrying about what numbers go in boxes to make it feel good for you.
 
What can we do about this? Well, we're in Early Access - there's still plenty of room to tweak the actual ways in which respawning happens, when it triggers, all that jazz - to make it feel right. But regardless of what we do, it'll still be exposed in the sandbox settings. We could obfuscate those settings by giving them fairly meaningless names, but that would then make customising sandbox kind of shit - if you're setting options whose effect is unknown.
 
edit: I would also like to mention in this word "cheat" heavy post, that we endevour to cheat as little as possible, obviously. I've banged on about it simply to emphasise the point that it has to happen at some point in this, and almost every game. But the fact that most times, you can see a whopping horde, turn, run off, turn, run back, and there is the same whopping horde shows that we are actually simulating in a non-cheaty way a pretty damn large number of zombies

Here is the problem we have:
 
In an ideal world, we would simply simulate a million zombies in real-time - they would all move around the map according to what they see and hear, if they're killed, they're dead permanently. Additional zombies would only ever 'migrate' in from the very edges of the map. No approximation would be going on. I think that we can all agree that this would be the perfect way for the game to operate.
 
I think we also intuitively know that such a system would be impossible for a number of reasons - not just the processing required for the A.I or the ridiculous burden on your net connection in multiplayer, but also the fact that the zombies would need to know about parts of the map which aren't streamed in (even if we made the map a fraction of the size it is, parts of it would still not be in memory at any given location). So that's out as a solution, by miles.
 
So. What can we do? How can we get the huge zombie populations that we need to give a satisfying sensation of being in the zombie apocalypse? Well, on some level, we have to cheat, just like all other games do on some level. Again, in an ideal world, you cheat in a manner which looks to the player as if you're not cheating. When you play games with incredibly sophisticated A.I. and oh my God it's so clever and amazing - this is because they cheated in a way in which it wasn't noticeable. Good job! 10/10
 
Now we've got a problem. We're a sandbox game. We need to give the player control over how the game operates. We need to let the player customise their experience. This means exposing the controls to the sandbox settings. Now when we cheat, we need to give you a little box in order to customise that cheat. We need to reveal that there is such a thing as migration and respawning. Without the sandbox options, we could have randomised the respawning a little and simply pretended that what you were seeing was migration. Oh! Those zombies were simulated! They must have heard a noise, wandered over, and that explains why this cleared out area now has some zombies in it. With some incredibly well phrased bullshit, we probably could have convinced a number of people that actually somehow we were able to pull off simulating that ridiculous a number of zombies.
 
The more technical amongst you probably would have smelled bullshit - but you wouldn't be able to say exactly how we were bullshitting.
 
Not so with a sandbox game. We have to expose how it works. There's no way we can bullshit our way out of this. And that means, because you know that respawning is something which happens, you're now in the position of thinking that the only explanation for some zombies being somewhere they shouldn't be is because of respawning - sort of Occam's Razor logic. And it puts us in a position where we're having a discussion in terms of those sandbox options, rather than having a general discussion about how the game feels - completely isolated from number in boxes. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in.
 
Because in an ideal world, all you guys would be talking about how the game feels - and only we developers would be worrying about what numbers go in boxes to make it feel good for you.
 
What can we do about this? Well, we're in Early Access - there's still plenty of room to tweak the actual ways in which respawning happens, when it triggers, all that jazz - to make it feel right. But regardless of what we do, it'll still be exposed in the sandbox settings. We could obfuscate those settings by giving them fairly meaningless names, but that would then make customising sandbox kind of shit - if you're setting options whose effect is unknown.
 
edit: I would also like to mention in this word "cheat" heavy post, that we endevour to cheat as little as possible, obviously. I've banged on about it simply to emphasise the point that it has to happen at some point in this, and almost every game. But the fact that most times, you can see a whopping horde, turn, run off, turn, run back, and there is the same whopping horde shows that we are actually simulating in a non-cheaty way a pretty damn large number of zombies