Flat terrain/building mode

[oskarkk]

This is more of a technical question out of curiosity. Most AoE2 players hate how the building sprites are positioned on hills and how it's very difficult to tell if there's a hole in your wall. The best way to check this in DE is to select a wall in the building menu and move your mouse between the buildings to see if there's any tile where the "building preview" isn't red (or clicking your units to go to the other side of the wall, where pathfinding becomes holefinding). Seeing and selecting units behind buildings is also difficult (you just cannot see a tower built right behind a castle).

RedPhosphoru, a player famous for exploiting AoE2 engine quirks, uses an awful-looking mod to make buildings flat:

The sprite is the hitbox, so flat sprites make selecting easier. Mods like this are helpful when you optimize your game for clarity and the ability to click everything, but aesthetically they are a crime.

So, my question, coming from a software dev who knows nothing about rendering in general, and specifically nothing about how rendering works in this project, is:

1. Would it be possible to make a switch/hotkey that enables a "flat buildings view", like with the mod in the screenshot above, but during the game?
2. Would it be possible to make a switch that makes the rendered terrain flat, no elevation, every building rendered at the same level?

Are there any major technical difficulties that would make implementing such features hard? Would it be possible to implement this within the architecture of this project?

[TheJJ]

i would say yes, clearly possible. :)

the flat rendering is a replacement of the sprites, just like that mod. and rendering without hills would be setting all elevation levels to 0, but just for rendering (the simulation would still consider the heights for speed adjustments etc).

[zahidcover4-lgtm]

Video game developers take a designer’s concepts and build them into a playable game for users. Video game developers, also known as games developers or video game programmers, write code for games for a variety of formats, such as PCs, consoles, web browsers and mobile phones.