Ways to implement height on isometric tiles

[yesko]

The best way to do this depends on how many different heights you need.

1. For very few different heights, I think your second approach will work fine
2. If you need a lot of heights(> 5 or something) you might want to do it like this:

• create one alternative tile for each possible height (with TileSetAtlasSource.create_alternative_tile)
• set the offset of all the alternative tiles to -height, with height in pixels
• for each tile you place, choose the alternative tile corresponding to its height

3. In the niche scenario that a) you exceed the limit of 4096 alternative tiles or b) creating alternative tiles becomes to performance-heavy, you could theoretically do what I ended up doing for my project and modify the engine source. I can show you how I did it but I really don’t recommend this way unless absolutely necessary and you’d need to write C++
4. @dragonforge-dev suggested this as a solution to a somewhat related problem of mine; I just haven’t fully tested it out myself so I can neither recommend it nor advise against it:

@dragonforge-dev

The way I would solve that problem, based on what I see, is make a 2.5D game. Have the environment be 3D and the players, monsters, etc be 2D. It would seem to simplify your map generation problems. But I don’t know if that would cause you problems other places.

Note that both 2. and 3. only work with TileSetAtlasSource, if you’re using TileSetScenesCollectionSource I think you’re either going to have to set the offset manually in a class that all tiles inherit, or resort to option 1. Like this:

class_name SceneTile
extends Sprite2D # or any other class with an offset property

var height: int = 0

func set_height(value: int) -> void:
    height = value
    offset = Vector2(0, -value)