Tag Archives: isometry

Understanding isometric grids

Isometric grid coordinate conversion demo
A GIF of the interactive demo seen later in this post.

Questions about the algorithms related to isometric grids are not uncommon. In fact, they are a little more common than you could expect them to be, given the relative simplicity of things.

So I have decided to write a little blog post on the two things important here:

  1. Converting local isometric grid' coordinates to global screen-space coordinates
  2. Converting global/screen-space coordinates to isometric grid' local coordinates
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GameMaker: alpha mask on isometric tiles

As you might have noticed, process of making nice-looking isometric games can be tricky.
Especially that part when you want your terrain look like actual terrain rather than arrangement of isometric images.
Common approach to this is to use alpha channel mask(s) to smooth edges of tiles.
Here I've made a script that applies such mask to given sprite, handling all additional actions needed.

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