RTS/City Building style Game: diamondIso or pure sprite?

[StephenZ]

I've been playing with Crafty for a few days, with the intent of
making a prototype interface for a city building/rts style game. I'm
currently looking for recommendations on implementation style based on
experienced users' perspective, with performance and render quality
the priorities.

My main question is regarding performance: would an iso/diamondIso
tile based implementation, or a pure sprite one be more performant?

I've played around with the diamondIso implementation demo at
http://blackscorp.github.com/tiled2crafty/tests/ (Thanks Witali!),
as well as the isometric game test/demo on Github, and I'm wondering
if all those tiles are really the best way to go, given the
performance needed to get a decent play area.

From the pure sprite side of things, my only real concern at the
moment would be having to have a single, huge (3200x1600) sprite to
use as the "ground layer"--it's both a huge texture, and a pretty
large sprite! The rest should be pretty simplistic, since all the
player will do is to place individual sprites into the scene for each
building.

Any thoughts? Am I missing anything obvious?

Thanks in advance!

[witali mik]

Well my demo is kinda laggy because iam moving the viewport and redraw the object on each movement, in a building city game, you have mostly a drag and drop function which is easier to handle

for your groundlayer, you can make a smaller ground layer and make it repeatable like on isogenic engine demo, isogenic is commercial framework made for isometric games only.

i tryed the days the KineticJS framework. it is really small framework and has only view drawing functions

http://jsfiddle.net/B6TdG/15/embedded/result/

as you can see it is performant, because i draw 3 different layers. but if you wish to make a game with it, you have to code many stuffs by yourself like collision detection, audio,keyboard input and so on. i gues as far as that features are implemented into kinetic it will loose performance as well.

maybe another alternatives is my old map editor which is made pure with HTML
well its a map editor but, it makes that what you expect, place images in isometric grid and save it;)

http://dev.cruel-online.de/

you can try everything out

[StephenZ]

I dug into your tutorial/demo pretty in depth, taught me quite a bit (especially about what I didn't know about Crafty!)

I just now caught this fiddle in the Cookbook thread which most probably solves my main concern with the sprite based approach:  http://jsfiddle.net/FpNaF/  (How to use a large background in a scene), and I think it will push me to the full sprite solution.

Thanks for the quick response!

[G]

Using lots of crafty sprites to create the tiled background is reaaaaally slow when you get to high resolutions. I tried creating a 2k map using 16 pixel sprites only to discover that making 16,384 (128*128) crafty sprites took about a hour to complete... Which led me to create the background map approach described in the fiddle above.