Further Reading
The Isometrix Project (http://www.isometrix.org/; http://isometrix.tsx.org/) concentrates on isometric tile games. The articles section covers topics such as map formats, tile layout, placing objects, and lighting. The engines section lists code sources, tools, and demos.
I mentioned GameDev.net's "Isometric and Tile-based Games" section at the end of the last chapter (http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=44). It contains over 30 articles on tile-based gaming.
A good introductory book is Isometric Game Programming with DirectX 7.0 (Muska and Lipman/Premium-Trade) by Ernest Pazera. The first 230 or so pages are about Windows programming, and the examples use C. However, there's good stuff on the basics of rectangular and isometric games tile plotting, drawing, world and map coordinate systems, and moving about a map.
Some modern Java isometric or tile games examples, which come with source code, are:
- Javagaming.org: Scroller (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgo-scroller/)
A full-screen isometric scrolling game intended to illustrate how to write high-performance 2D games in J2SE 1.4.
- haphazard (http://haphazard.sourceforge.net/)
A role-playing game set in an isometric world.
- CivQuest (http://civquest.sourceforge.net/)
A strategy game inspired by Civilization, including game play against AI opponents. The coding is at an earlier stage.
- IsometricEngine (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jisoman/)
An isometric game engine written by Jason Gauci, with support ...