Sceptic said:
I went with Dark Sun top-down... Frankly I find no advantage whatsoever to Dreamweb top-down.
Good call on avoiding ISO - with play centered around LOS and firing angles on a single plane, it's the most informative and direct way to present the action. So, I seem to be a little late to the party, but I'll still chime in on the two top-down projections.
In the DS style, there can be a definite aesthetic advantage. I don't think the "unrecognizable blob-people" issue with DW would be a big problem at an even remotely modern resolution (especially if the play area had some actual screen space) but the silhouette of a human being is just one of those things our brain really likes to see wherever it possibly can. Contrast a stick figure side-on and top-down. Furthermore, many objects are more recognizable by their vertical faces - wall-mouted switches, lockers, and other staples of environmental interactivity. Mind you this only does any real good if they all face south, and you plan on having that stuff anyway. Most do have easy "true top-down" alternatives (terminals and crates for the above) but some are tricker to figure out, like signage.
The only direct aesthetic disadvantage to DS-style I can think of is that once height is present in your art, having everything top out so as to fit in the bounds of one tile can look a little odd, but, unless done very carefully, having objects extend "up," into and over the next tile north, puts us right back at blocking view of the actual playfield and disrupting the otherwise very direct gameplay / screen correlation.
The indirect aesthetic disadvantage is a pragmatic doozy, though. In DS-style, you multiplying your framecount for each rotatable object by however many discrete angles you can visibly face - you can get away with just one for a totally abstracted style, but that probably won't work with the emphasis on LOS - you need to see who's looking where. Any more than one and you
need four so people don't run backwards when going north or west. Plan on eight, so as to distinguish diagonal facings. This is obviously a bigger bitch than just rotating the sprite, and will never be as smooth, as long as your engine can't do what Nintendon't.
One last area to cover, that may be wholly invalidated depending on your mechanics: exact LOS, firing angles, and target profiles are a lot easier to eyeball in DW-style topdown than DS-style. In the most abstracted style of calculating this, i.e. checking the LOS on the square tile boundries, you only have a mild visual disconnect unless every object and character is a cube... not really a big deal, all told. However, if you intend on taking the actual object and target profiles into consideration when dealing with LOS and cover on the screen / play surface, e.g. sideways targets having slimmer profiles, windows/corners providing incrementally better/worse cover as the angle of incoming fire strays from 90 degrees, the handling of arcing sprays or frag shrapnel... well...
I don't anticipate actually
doing it but I feel as if the ideal system would let me plant a straight-edge or protractor on my screen and check my lines vs the sprites. This can actually be integrated into the engine by using the "central angle" of targets and obstructions as measured from the shooter (pixel-perfect or bounding box for the target as you please.) I always thought that would fit snugly into a stat-based system by expressing a character's accuracy as control over the shot's angle, that being compared against the angle in the shooter's FOV the target occupies. This method allows for a very natural, "one-size fits all" calculation covering the increasing difficulty of a shot as a target gets smaller / further away / more obstructed, and stacks nicely with a weapon accuracy stat in the same vein. It also has obvious applications to misses, grazes, and richochet as one may desire.
Imagine firing through a copse of trees: it's much easier to see (and implement) the effects of the trees from all angles when their area on the XY plane is visibly defined; otherwise an east-west shot at a target is attempting to hit a width that is merely implied, and by the sprite PERPENDICULAR to the one shown.
