   Issue with Top-Down Tile Graphics
  (Crossposted from rec.games.roguelike.development)Good Afternoon,I'm still slowly plodding away at my vapourware roguelike - which isas of my concept pushing the definition as it will hopefully be- In the old west- Plot driven- Turn based - but only in battle (like fallout) - which makes sensebecause there wouldn't be as much as a traditional roguelike- Graphical (like the SNES RPGs)- Randomised town and worldSo basically - a JRPG roguelike. I'm slowly plodding away at graphicsat the moment and have faced a bit of a design issue which I waswondering if anybody had any ideas of how to solve in a reasonablemanner.I'm hoping to be able to use the top down style of graphics like somany of those JRPGs like how I drew the Saloon in http://tinyurl.com/2egshda.. What I can't quite figure out is how to have buildings that face theother way such that you can still have a clue as to what they are andwhere the enterences etc are, or what items are hidden by the initialfacade. I'd rather still be able to put enterances to buildings facingthe main street realistically unlike Pokemon or the like which solvedthe problem by putting multiple rows of shops all facing the front. Istill want to be able to generate a reasonable looking townprocedurally!Has anybody any ideas?lochok   
  It's all about the transparency.  Do a line-of-sight check to eye-level obscured features, like your street facing doors, and make the roof of that building transparent.  If you don't want the player seeing into the building, black out everything but key things like doors and windows.  Take a look at how the old XCOM games did it (random screenie from Google image search: http://gameaxis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/xcom_old_02.jpg)   ;  Not exactly my issue. That's actually very much like what I was intending on doing.I'm talking more the sheriffs office, gaol, church or whatever on the other side of the street. Like - I understand I could just make things partially transparent to be able to see what is standing in its shade or something - but I'm finding it really hard to work out how you would see that what you can see the back of is a sheriffs office, gaol etc., see where you could enter it and see what's on its balcony.Thanks for the feedback anywaylochok   ;  I guess I'm not following what you're trying to accomplish or I'm not expressing myself well enough.This is kinda what I have in mind (sorry about art quality, a netbook trackpad is hardly ideal for image manipulation):The backwards sign is easy enough to read, I think, but it doesn't look too out of place frontwards (despite being technically incorrect) if you don't want to make players reach for a mirror.Would that work for the problem you're having, or am I still off?   ;  Hmmm... that might work! I'll see how it worksThanks for the advice   ;  Maybe you could only draw the outlines of important hidden stuff (characters, doors, objects) with yellow for example. Just like in Red Alert 3. And if you move the mouse over an object, it becomes fully visible (or maybe a "tooltip" pops up).   ;  I mean something like this:;  If you don't want to represent the door on screen you could do a top-down minimap which shows characters and doors. I think syndicate used this approach.   