Is it possible to add a coloured height overlay?

[Benedict151]

Been meaning to post this for sometime but for some reason it keeps slipping my mind

Sometimes I find it hard to tell (certainly hard to tell at a glance) who is uphill/downhill (or higher/lower) especially when fighting in rugged terrain. I don't think I am alone here.

Would it be possible to add an option (a key?) that could toggle a height overlay on/off?
E.g. all tiles that are height 0 are shaded very dark green, those at 50 are shaded dark green, 100 medium green and so on... ...
Actually, I guess you might need 3 sets of colours/shading - 1 for northern european terrain, 1 for mediterranean and 1 for desert.

I can see that it might not be the most visually attractive addition, but the functionality I feel would be helpful at times.

Ben

[w_michael]

If it is easy to do, then it would be a welcome addition.

[Patrick Ward]

It's something that's been in the plan since before we started development. I think I was still working on Ancients DLC when I spoke to Pip about it. I wanted to provide a better idea of the height of a hill and so its slope direction without having to mouse over. The current graphics were created assuming it would be in but issues arose that where outside our control and it didn't happen beyond an initial proof of concept rough in the shader.

I'm on the verge of changing all the hill graphics but there's currently a chance we'll be getting some engine fixes/changes so I don't want to jump the gun ( note that in the next beta there's some temporary graphics on hill bases .. I forgot they were there tbh so just ignore them. They were the final iteration of contour lines and other things to try to indicate the slope direction but they all failed. ).

And no it's not something thats easy to do beyond recolouring the base terrain. What do you do about objects/overlays that sit on that terrain and are deliberately coloured to blend properly with the underlying colour? Do we also re-colour them? How stupid are buildings going to look if we recolour them?
That side of it couldn't be tested in the proof of concept so we need to see how it goes. It's a can of worms and will be the deciding factor.

Pat

Edited: because on redirecting someone here I found a couple of embarrassing typos.