Mountains and the Illusion of Elevation

[ThatHelicopterPilot]

I'm sure that most people have crossed a bridge in PZ before, but how many people wondered about how the height works?  Well there is no "height" because the terrain is not coded like that, it's just the bridge tile put in place of the water tile and painted in such a way to create the illusion that the bridge has height.
 

This lead me to the idea of having cliffs that are not based on the height levels, like 1st and 2nd floors are, but are painted on the ground like roads and have a rock/stone color to make them seem cliffy and tall. There can be a orientation aspect to these tiles that wouldn't permit you to see what is "above" the cliff if you are looking at it from "below". You also couldn't build over these tiles at different height levels.
 

If implemented, this would permit the creation of mountains while keeping the height levels starting at 0. Below there is a image(Not mine) from Age of Empires meant to show how a 2d game can create the illusion of elevation.

Edited August 18, 2023 by ThatHelicopterPilot

[knightshousegames]

With the new B42 dynamic height system coming in, this might be more feasable

 

One issue it might face is coming down from elevation from certain agles, like walking north/west while trying to go down in incline might look super weird. But word is they might be solving the issue with depth for stuff facing north as west as well, so maybe it could work.

 

It rarely ever looks realistic, but if they can figure it out, it could be cool for improving the defense of bases, like digging trenches and other defensive land works

[Jack Bower]

If someone finds a way to make this work, they'll be my hero.

[Mrxbath]

Bump for this. I feel that it would be a matter of texture trickery as you described above. The trouble would be that they'd have to basically re-do the map to add elevation everywhere, or there would just be a randomly super mountainous region somewhere, when everything else has been flat lol.

 

I do feel like you could theoretically use a terrain heat map to define height regions like this.

 

Here's a video where this guy makes them by hand using the concept you described

 

Edited October 18, 2023 by Mrxbath

[Drifter]

I can imagine the game handling the back side of cliffs and mountains much like it does when players are behind buildings.  Unfortunately, the area south of Louisville KY has lots of hills and valleys going on  so if the devs wanted to add mountains and keep the map somewhat true to the real location, they would need to rework most of it.