Well, I'm just full of ideas today (amusing, as noone's yet even commented on whether or not people would like me to work on this game). As I can't run the game, I don't know if this is even an issue here, but I'll put this out anyway.
One of the things that has always irritated me to no end about traditional 2D RPG's is the issue caused by the angle of scenery. There seem to be two main schools of thought, each one quite irritating in it's own right. To take a simple example: my character is walking around a desert town, and comes to a palm tree. Depending on the school of thougt of the programmers, one of two things will happen; either the top of the palm tree will stop me as though it were on ground level, or I will be able to walk everywhere I would normally be able to, but will be hidden by the tree. Both are highly unrealistic, lead to gameplay problems, and are just plain irritating. So, here's my idea on what might be done:
Scenery could be drawn in two layers. The base layer, containing everything, acts just like the second school of thought (can walk anywhere you normally could in RL), with one exception--the character is drawn on top of the scenery. Over the top of everything is the second layer of scenery, which is identical to the base layer, with one exception; it is a 33% (or so) transparent PNG. As such, scenery looks completely solid and opaque, but when the player, an item, an NPC, or an enemy would be hidden by them, they are instead 33% visible. If this could be implemented, it would effectively bypass both problems and give the gameplay a much nicer feel.
Scenery idea
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ElvenProgrammer
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I've read many tutorials about this topic, it's an hard to solve problem if you want to make it also good looking, the easier way it's to draw the 9 tiles around the player of the 3rd layer with transparency. This shouldn't be so much performance stressing but of course won't be a so beautiful effect.
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