[pygame] Isometrics

[Kris Schnee <kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm having some success with an isometric tile display:
http://niss-the-ai.livejournal.com/32795.html
This uses only Pygame, not OpenGL. The sprites aren't animated right now 
but auto-load multiple animation frames and can be manually told to 
change frames. The translucent water plane washes up and down, but looks 
subtly wrong when a character is standing "on top" of it. There's also 
music.

Right now I can place sprites using iso coordinates and have them move 
instantly in increments of whole tiles, like chess pieces. The display 
also can be set to scroll to follow a POV character. Unfortunately the 
system is hideously inefficient, with each tile being drawn and its 
position recalculated each frame for the sake of proper transparency, 
rather than "precompiling" it to its own surface. It's also a pain to 
make the tiles, especially those side pieces. A program called PyKira 
offers some way of making them automatically from square textures, but I 
wasn't able to get it working.

This program is the equivalent of a chess board, storing the pieces 
themselves but not the rules by which they move. Next I want to hook 
this up to my "Aquablue" worldsim, which will feed it movement data and 
load world data from XML files as it used to. As I did with my 2D 
"Coral" display system, I want this set up so that you can walk forever 
in any direction with no loading screens.

Kris