Tom HappVerified account

you ever run into a tech problem that feels actually fucking impossible to solve properly, but somehow old SNES games managed to do it, so you know that not only is it not impossible to solve, but should also be pretty easy if hardware that old could manage it

this problem brought to you by "how the fuck did old isometric games manage to depth sort sprites and tiles together"

all modern resources for this are either "use 3D lol" or "generate a directed graph of all pairs of sorted objects based on whether they care about draw order then remove all the cycles and topological sort the result" aint no snes games doing that lmao

(or are the obvious/naive solutions that don't actually work once you want to be able to stand on tiles of varying heights)

all I want to know is exactly how final fantasy tactics advanced did it on the GBA

You could possible run it in an emulator and actually look at how the map layers and sprite layers change as you move characters around the battlefield. I bet some of the terrain is actually sprites.

yeah it's probably the case that some of the terrain that can block stuff is done as sprites, then it still needs to do the directed acyclic graph / topological sort to order the sprites though. I guess thats just fast enough when its only a couple tiles instead of all of them?