With the reversion to the more basic hex block shapes, I have begun experimenting with using elevation. I don't know that I would actually use elevation in the gameplay mechanics, but rather just as a look-and-feel thing. It wouldn't necessarily be a difficult change from a gameplay perspective to use elevation, but then I would need to animate for elevation changes and all the other nitpicky little details that would come with it. However, I do think that elevation in the map does work rather nicely from a visual standpoint:



Without AO, though, it can be a little bit difficult picking out different elevations. As an experimental hack, I tried scaling the diffuse color of the ground in the shader based on Y:




This does help somewhat with picking out the different elevations, but it does throw the lighting off a bit. It's something I'll probably still have to tinker with.

I'm in the process of organizing the assets. In the initial prototype, I was simply heaping all of the assets into the folders Data/Models, Data/Materials and Data/Textures. Not really the most orderly of systems. Now I am organizing them into various sub-folders, with units compartmentalized for easier access. It's time consuming, but necessary.