Far from being as violent as the Judge Dredd story; Block Mania (although I’d squeeze in a reference to Old Stoney Face any chance I get), I’ve spent a few evenings drawing a bunch (and more to come) of isometric blocks. Isometric tile editors are usually associated with pixelart, not vectors, so my original intent was to script a tool in which I could sculpt with these blocks. I discarded that idea after realizing it would be a massive undertaking and not a very stable solution. Not really knowing what I would do with them, I continued drawing anyway, as I’m just so fond of isometric projection, as evident in one of my earlier posts.

This fascination stems back to the days or yore when I was playing games on my Amiga 500 (those where the days!) such as Marble Madness, Populous and D/Generation to name a few. Well, not to mention cyberpunk-awesomeness Syndicate, of which there are rumors that swedish Starbreeze Studios will “reinvent”.

Anyway, I ended up with all these building blocks, wanting to create miniature worlds (there it is again, my megalomaniacal behavior), but not wanting to manually drag them into place and having to adjust the layer order all the time.

The solution – which might not be the best in terms of time efficiency – was to script a little tool that could parse a text file into a nested array representing the X, Y and Z-axis. Instead of handling mouse events and coming up with a smart solution as to how I was going to manage selection of blocks (which most likely would have to involve some inconvenient keyboard input), I just lay my “world” out on graph-paper, an excel document or such; one sheet per level, like this.

Perhaps time consuming, but I think it could work to my advantage, having to carefully plan ahead instead of throwing myself Head Over Heels (isometric pun intended).

And to top it off, here’s some isometric galore to – literally – fill your screen with!

Left to right: Syndicate, Populous, Cadaver, Darkmere, Uropa², Marble Madness, D/Generation, Head Over Heels and Escape From The Planet Of Robot Monsters.

Every time the tool chooses a tile it will first pick a random number between 0-100. If the random number is less than or equal to the percentage input it will verify that no neighboring tiles require a connection and then pick an empty tile. If, however, there are tiles next to it that do require a connection it will simply disregard the sparseness. This way the percentage could be somewhat misleading but over a long enough period of time I guess it will even out.

Now, this script is probably my least useable one as the outcome wasn’t very nice or functional. So what does it do then?

Well, the idea was to make a script that would produce a raster image with only one tone. Aptly named Monotone Raster. Since a raster will create dots of varying sizes corresponding to the level of gray of the target image pixels. This is not very hard in Scriptographer. But what if I wanted to make a raster image with something other than a circle, or, a raster with multiple objects?

Well, that wasn’t that hard either so I took it a bit further. What if the objects looked different, but in reality they all had the same amount of black?

These objects seem to differ but they all represent 50% black so a rasterized picture would, at a distance, seem to be just a gray square but at closer range some details would appear and reveal a picture. This turned out to be wrong. Close up it didn’t make any sense at all, just a bunch of squares cluttered together.

However, I encountered alot of problems.

First off, with every object being quite alot bigger than a pixel the resulting raster image would become huge!

Secondly, every object contains many anchors so there would be millions of them making the file size very big.

Thirdly, getting Java to handle this many objects, one per pixel, without running out of memory is virtually impossible. One solution to this problem would be to reduce the target image resolution but that would also make it harder to discern any of the finer details, thus making the raster quite useless.

Although it didn’t turn out as I had planned I still think it is a novel idea that was definately worth exploring.

The idea of making something, preferably complex, out of a limited set of rules, principles or objects is very appealing to me. It’s like art sprung out of (almost) nothingness. It’s called synergy – when the sum is greater than its parts. I think these patterns adresses just that; very simple and mundane geometric shapes, but put together, they create something more with seemingly infinte possibilities of variation.

Now, I thought about this for a while, wondering if I had the patience to construct my own symbols and shapes and turn them into a working font, I finaly decided I had not. What would be the point, it’s been done already. Although, I had one concern, as all these symbols where made as fonts there isn’t a very intuitive way to rotate a symbol or flip it around its own axis. Sure, it isn’t that hard to flip a character around, but say if there are a 1000 different symbols it becomes time consuming and counterproductive.

My solution to this problem was to create a script which allowed me to type with objects instead of letters. Each object would be assigned to a specific letter with the added ability to rotate and flip each object during typing using the arrowkeys.

This way I could reduce the number of objects to a minimum.

I added some other features as well. I can navigate around the artboard using the arrowkeys or simply clicking anywhere with the mouse. The script calculates the right position to line up the objects perfectly, it also takes any tile spacing into consideration, should there be any.

Fonticon works really well and can be alot of fun to play around with, building a picture from the ground up. I would say that this is a much more intuitive way of building patterns and you don’t have to make all your shapes and symbols into a working font either so the workflow should be faster. The only problem, and a pretty big one at that, is that I currently haven’t figured out an easy way to colorize them since each object is actually several small objects grouped togehter with a transparent “frame”.

I have recently added some functions to two of my scripts; aMaze and the Tile Toy. The maze script can now save it’s wall data to a file which allows me to use it inside my Tile Toy script creating mazes with a completely different look. The appearance of the maze is now totally based on what kind of tiles I create within Tile Toy.

At the moment it only supports ‘single file’ tiles therefore only five tiles are needed (since it is a perfect maze it has no need for a solitary tile). Actually that number is closer to four, as a four-way intersection seems to be very rarely used.

Finally my new script works!

The idea was to make a script that would, out of limited number of tiles, create seemingly infinite variations of map- or roadlike patterns.

The tiles needs some rules in order to pair them up so I drew some temporary lines representing roads just to make it easier to understand how to match them up with each other. I soon noticed that I only needed six different variations in order to make a continous map/pattern without any of the lines ending abruptly.

No matter what tile the script chooses, it will always be possible to put another tile on either side of it and make it pair up with the rest of the pattern since all the roads lie on the symmetry axis. This is, on the other side, only true if each tile is ‘single filed’. The number of tiles needed will increase dramaticly with every additional ‘file’.

In the single file tile set above there are 16 possible ways of placing the tiles:

• Tile #1: 4 rotations
• Tile #2: 4 rotations
• Tile #3: 1 static
• Tile #4: 2 rotations
• Tile #5: 1 static
• Tile #6: 4 rotations

But, in a tile set with a higher number of files simply rotating the tile in 90º increments won’t do since it’s symmetry axis will be offset.

Evidently, reflecting a tile both vertically and horizontaly yields the same result as rotating 180º.

The script has to consider the fact that each tile should be able to both rotate and reflect.