[Adonthell-artwork] height levels

[cirrus]

I have a few questions about the new height level thing on mapobjects:

Do you specify a height/ z-offset (or whatever it was called) for whole
mapobjects or is there something like a height-map file which determines
how high the individual pixels of a mapobject are?


The reason is that river I made a while ago. I was just about to go back
to it and improve some of the things that were suggested at the time
like making the depth of the water appear to increase gradually from the
shore and making the water more translucent. Thing is, if we want the
character to be able to wade through it we have to be able to say the
water is lower than the ground but since the shore is not straight we
need some good way of doing this. If it is, as I suspect, on a
per-mapobject basis this would be virtually impossibe as th gfx would
need to  split up into loads of tiny pieces.

The ideal solution was if you could have a greyscale bitmap accompanying
the mapgfx where say 128 grey is the height the whole mapobject has been
set to and any lighter values are increasing heights relative to that.
Darker shades of grey are then relative drops in height. Basically it
would be a kind of bump-map.
Apart from being a bitch to program that would probably be quite CPU
intensive though so I'm not sure if it is a good idea to go for such
precision.


Food for thought, I guess. For now I'll just improve the look of those
gfx...

        -James

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