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Comment by atum47 | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone. I've made a isometric tile map a while ago - http://jsfiddle.net/victorqribeiro/k3bazwnj/ - but yesterday I found this really cool tile set - free to use - so I decided to make a tiny city builder. Hope you like it.

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Love it! Kenney makes some really nice assets. You might want to check out Raccoon Media https://racoon.media/ and Quaternius http://quaternius.com/assets.html for some expanded tiles that go with this set.

I can't find any tiles with railway tracks though :(

I think there's someone working on adding more tiles.

My wife saw this on screen and said “Oh, is that a kitchen planner?”

Hmm, MIT license, this could be a kitchen planner for her :)

I'm planning on doing this in webgl. Then she would be able to fully navigate her virtual kitchen. =)

If you make this I'd love to help out

To anyone interested in the webgl version, it would work something like this - https://victorribeiro.com/voxel/ - click to place a bloc, click and drag on the sides of the screen to rotate the view, keys 1 to 9 change the block.

You can make some really nice looking games using isometric tiles, Ceasar 3 comes to mind. Which looks much better then Ceasar 4 IMHO, which is 3d AFAIK. And game-play also feels better in C3.

Caesar 3 was a fantastic game.

Also: plebs are needed.

Same with Age of Empires 2 vs 4. Also Brigador for example of a recent game which makes excellent use of isometric visuals.

I still play Transport Tycoon fairly often. The open version at https://www.openttd.org/ is my goto.

I've tried a lot of the newer city builders and the 3D just does not do it for me. I find it clunky and awkward.

I played the f--- out of Ceasar 2 as a kid. That game was so good.

Small suggestion for UI improvement: while hovering over a tile, and pressing (say) the R key, you could rotate the tile by 90 degrees.

This generally doesn’t work for isometric tiles because flipping the tile on the y axis (what you’re suggesting by rotate 90) does not preserve the lighting being on the correct side, so the flipped tile looks wrong. In most cases you would need a whole new tile for the rotated piece.

Yes, I meant a newly rendered tile. Or just the corresponding rotated tile from the library if it exists.

You could use two bits in each pixel to indicate horizontal, left or right, and post-process light/dark depending on orientation. (Assuming only those faces and senses... though this project also has sloping roofs).

Or, couldn't you pretend the city rotated but the sun didn't (like a model under a lamp), so lighting is the same for all orientations?

i like it. Having to scroll through long vertical list of tiles to find the one you want is kind-of a pain though. Other than that, nifty. :)

that was the easiest most intuitive way I found to display the tiles. it's not great though

Nothing wrong with a scrolling layout, it's just a bit overrestricted: https://i.imgur.com/76BML6a.png

Filling some of the whitespace with scrollable grid of pieces would go a long way towards decreasing time for piece selection.

A 2D array might be easier to scroll through.

Also, I suggest highlighting the currently selected piece.

Came here to make both of these suggestions!

Perhaps make the list horizontal because of the highrises wasting space on the vertical list?

Nice, simple, and fun!

I also appreciate that you're very open to contributions! :)

thank you

Would you mind adding support for touch devices?

what device you're on? cause it works on my phone

Dont drag. Touch the piece and the touch the spot to drop it on.

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