Post by chess in Isometric Cyberpunk City - monogon comments

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OK after more experimentation I'm realizing it's not that I need a sprite sheet, it's that the assets don't use a consistent grid size, or a traditional 2:1 tile size (32x16, 64x32, etc.). I'm finding cell sizes to be around 161x85, with some variance in the y-dimension. Buildings and props don't adhere to a grid system, so you can't add them to your tile-map easily.

The assets are gorgeous and well-made, just want to give a word of warning for game devs attempting to drop these into a traditional 2:1 iso setup. It is not straightforward and you will get aliasing artifacts due to things not being a power of 2.

maxparata2 years ago

Hmm I see, those sprites are exported directly from magicavoxel so that's how the software handles it. I don't recall hearing problems from developers about it, so I'm sure there are some workaround.

I'm no Unity 2D dev, so I cannot help you with that. Have you tried to take a look at the sprite tools in Unity, it seems to have a lot of things that might be helpful : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Sprites.html

I'll still try to look deeper into it, I'll let you know if I find anything.

chess2 years ago

:) Yep, I'm attempting to use those sprite slicers now and that's where I'm running into inconsistencies. For level design in 2D games a common approach is "tile-mapping," and one of the golden rules there is to pick a uniform tile size and then stick to multiples of that for your larger sprites.

When things are uneven numbers, or not multiples of one another, it gets much harder to lay them out on the grid. You can bail out of the grid system, but this creates a new set of woes in 2D games.

Of course, this isn't your fault. MagicaVoxel only knows how to export sprites at the canvas size, and certainly isn't built for creating grid-based sprites. Just something to be aware of when converting 3D assets into sprites.

maxparata2 years ago (1 edit)

Well, as long as the width is divisible by 4, you can cut it in a grid. Which is the case here. I didn't find the one you mentioned that is 161px X 85px, which one is that?

On my side, all of their widths are multiples of 2, so they are divisible by 4, hence usable in a grid system.
The pack provides the sprite only, not sprite sheets, or atlases. The sprite sheet creation is to be handled on your side, maybe the unity tool is not a good fit with the Magicavoxel exports, there surely are other tools out there for sprite sheet creation.

Maybe that can help :

chess2 years ago

Here's how Unity's default sprite slice handles all the road chunks: https://imgur.com/a/NRp4YxM

You can tweak it so it includes a larger border, but then you have gaps between your tiles you have to hack around.

More importantly, there are inconsistencies in size even among things that should be on the same grid. For example the sidewalk_chunk is 89 pixels tall when sliced to remove all transparency. This has the same not-divisible by 2 issue, but it's also 4 pixels taller than the road chunk. So putting them on the same grid doesn't work well.

maxparata2 years ago

I understand, but the sprites that get eported out of Magicavoxel seem to not be usable directly with the Unity sprite tool. That's the thing. So you need to do the sprite sheet by yourself, using another tool/method, or find a way to use it as is.

chess2 years ago

Yep, understood, and appreciate the quick responses.

itch.io

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