3/4 perspective wall tile troubles

[naikonu]

I am creating walls for a level editor which will be placed by players instead of myself. Therefore, every possible combination of walls must be taken into account and possible. These walls consist of two repeating tiles; the front and top face (navy blue and teal respectively), and edges that indicate the orientation of the brick (represented as the blue lines). Due to these edges, the initial 2 repeating tiles turn into 20 different combinations of face and edge. This is shown in the first and third image.

I made a test in the second image using two face tiles, disregarding the varying edges. While these tiles looks fine as a single wall, they look much less coherent and professional placed next to one another, especially in vertical lines (circled in blue).. It is clear that the edges are necessary, but is it really necessary to have 20 different tiles? Is there some shortcut or simpler method I have yet to discover? I have struggled to find resources or references online.
It is important to note that not only will I be making walls comprised of simple line&square patterns, much like the wall in the test image, but organic designs such as rock walls and hedges too.

Unrelated to this issue, when walls are placed in horizontal lines "on top" of one another with one grid space in between, it creates visual confusion (circled in red). Is there any possible solution to this without changing the size of the wall faces, which would compromise the 3/4 perspective?



      

[eishiya]

There isn't really a shortcut, no. There are often ways to reuse some tiles for multiple positions, but unless your wall is visually designed to be built out of boxes, there's no getting around having numerous tiles for different arrangements. It doesn't have to be a very high number of them though, and most tile editors support automatically determining which tiles to use based on context.


As for the hole - the usual "solution" to this is to not place the tiles that way xP If there isn't a visible floor, players will often not think to go there, so you generally want to have the floor visible by making the hallways wide enough.
You could make the wall tops narrower (thinner walls), but this would require more variant tiles, since

An alternative solution is not to use two tiles per wall segment, but one tile that contains both visible sides of the wall (it'd be a thinner wall). That way the walls do not block any walkable areas, so things are never confusing. The downside, of course, is then the characters can never appear behind walls, which can look unnatural with larger tile sizes like this.

Edit: Your mock-up is missing tiles for walls placed in arrangements of 3x3 (to cover wall segments that are thicker than a tile, e.g. 2x2, 2x3, 4x356, whatever). Unless you have a way to prevent these arrangements, you may want to include those.

[dpixel]

It seems like your light blue lines are adding to the complexity, which is fine.  But, just think about how simple it could be without them.

eishiya makes a good point about a visible floor.

Generally, I wouldn't think a "wall" in a "wall tile" would take up the a whole tile.

This video I found helpful for the basics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFvsRvo_78Y

[CFKaligula]

Just a quick remark that 9-11, 10-12, 1-2-3-4 and 18-19 are all just flipped versions of each other? I don't know what you are programming in, but flipping a sprite isn't usually that hard. This would already reduce your amount of tiles to 14.

[naikonu]

I forgot to reply to this topic with what i ended up doing, this is for the sake of anyone else who may run into this problem. After much thinking I decided that there is no simple solution or shortcut. The best I could come up with is splitting up the face and edge and recombining them based on need, resulting in 19 graphics

I can't begin imagine how this will work with the organic designs i mentioned before, though, such as hedges and rock walls... ( ´△｀)

[Cherno]

If you add a diagonal shadow to the ground you can at least hint at the building shape and wether it is two one-story strips next to each other or a two-story building.

[Unnamed1334]

First, I think you are missing some possible tiles. Here are all the tiles I could come up with. I think this covers every possibility.


As for a better way to get all of the tiles, I found a way to get them all from 5 source tiles.
These are the tiles that are needed.


This works by dividing every tile into 4 sub tiles. These can be recombined into all of the other tiles that you need.
For example, a turn that connects top and left uses the bottom left of the first tile, top left of the second, bottom right of the third, and top right of the fourth.


I threw together a quick example. The middle row is trying to blend with wall tiles.

I did have to make a few changes to the example image due to the floor being transparent. The easiest workaround I found was to let the wall extend into the floor by half a tile.

You could either use the quarter tiles directly in the game or convert the tiles in to all possible full tiles. If you convert the tiles into full tiles you could then modify them individually. For example, dead ends could look very different from a corner.

[7Soul]

This online tool allows you to turn just a few tiles into every single possible combination

For example, it'll turn this:


Into this: