2014/08/24

Shearing

As I mentioned last time the upcoming release will be a maintenance release with some much-needed cleanup. While I'm still waiting for approval I have been working on a new feature for rectangular grids that I had wanted to do for quite a while now, but couldn't until the cleanup: I'm talking about shearing.

This is an un-rotated rectangular grid with skewed axes to create the popular 2:1 isometric look. This is quite powerful, because it allows for isometric 2D graphics to be used with Grid Framework. Getting an isometric look in a 3D game is very simple, you just rotate the camera until it looks right. However, in a 2D game the camera has to be perpendicular to the image plane and objects are just drawn as if they were at an angle, so rotation is out of question.

Shearing is fully implemented, I just need to write the documentation for it. It works with arbitrary numbers and for all axes along any other axis, so you can shear your grids any way you want. It will be a feature for the 1.5 update once the upcoming 1.4.2 release gets approved.