aes

Mentioning Blender isn't crazy, one way to make 2d art is to make 3d models and render the poses and orientations you need.

Well, you can do the composition on the fly, by having the different sides of the diagonal on different tilemap layers, that'd make things easier, right?

Check my thinking here, but you'll get a checkerboard pattern alternating diagonals, right? Then, I'd suggest

• two layers, 'far' and 'near', for the tile-halves
• a parent 'control' tilemap layer, with ugly editing tiles offset half a tile, (so it gives you a way to draw using the materials you care about) and code to render that into the fragment layers.

It's how this works: https://github.com/aes/autotile3d and it would work.

But then, there's this, I guess: https://youtu.be/dclc8w6JW7Y

First thought: Wow, that looks just like how Syndicate works.

Second: that's a terrible idea. (at least in 2025)

There's a tutorial (this one, I think https://youtu.be/i_XV78N7Zuo) on how to make a tool to compose your tiles.

If you want to make a tile-space renderer, that's harder, but having done it, I can probably talk you through it. You need to look through tile-space diagonally to make in-front/behind work correctly. The way I'd do it today would probably be to 'shoot rays' from the view direction, into the tile-space, and record the first, or however many tile fragments necessary to completely obscure the view. Then, just* render from that look-up-table. (there's a fruity view(x, y) to tile(x, y, z) transform, and you still need to render transient objects at the correct depth. Also, scrolling/panning, do you only do that by tile, or do you also do sub-tile-fragment pan?)

If you can get away with just stacking some tilemaps, do that instead, but ask if you need more.

For 32-bit space I can simply make a 512MB Bitmask lol and then AND/OR the two Bitmask. Easy

Uh, no, that's O(n), yeah?