Oh one more thing.. Iso tiles, when tiled together, do not look like that a tile further away is smalle, because they're basically covering your screen (you can't see the sky). So whatever's on your screen, will look like it's there. But 3D isometrics view has nothing to do with how the distant objects look smaller. The view is still isometric. Infact you could lower the 45 Y axis and then may be add an sky box and also Fog and things like that, that would also make it look really coool. But that would still be isometrics view..


To tell you the truth, isometric view is really how the tiles look and how the movement is.

When in ddraw, u draw your tiles in a diamond shape, when they apear on the screen, in iso view, it kind of looks as if you're looking at it from the side, not the corner and the tile is still diamond.

A lot of people get confused by this and make diamond tile and put them together, but the movement is not isometrics, because when you move, it moves the map diagonally because of the view, and because the x and y axis are messed up, so x would be going diagonally and Y would be going diagonally. i've seen people make diamond tiles, and making a top-down game, and calling it isometric. But the movement was straight left/right/up/down. It looked really bad.

What you're saying is also right, depending on what kinda co-ordinate system you use. that's why tiles are drawn on a world matrix because then the world matrix decides how you look at the thing..