Tile System Look And Feel

Today I saw more screenshot of Starcraft 2: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/starcraft2/news.html?sid=6187499&tag=topslot;title;2&om_act=convert&om_clk=topslot

It make me realize once again: that is the look and feel I want to have in my game. Imagin controlling a robot, battling other robots and aliens in that environment. In fact my game's tile system is inspired first by Metal Gear Solid: VR mission, Starcraft and Neverwinter Nights.
Of course I am not sure how things are done in Starcraft 2, but obviously I cannot do it exactly the same way as SC2 because I don't have that much art and programming resources to achieve the same effect. It looks simple but I think there are a lot of details that require quite some work when observe closely. I think that's one of the reason Starcraft feels different from other RTS such as Supreme Commander and Command & Conquer series. Neverthless I think I will reinstall Starcraft or Warcraft 3 and then use it's editor to recheck if there are other ideas I can use.

Right now I think the tile system is working ok, so for sure I won't make any major changes. But recently I also thought of other things that can be added into the tile system, although not sure if I am going to do them at all:

• One Piece Tile idea: allow the level designer to add in 1 3D model as a whole piece of tile (similar idea to my one piece GUI and tile gui type separation)
• Height Map layer: allow the level designer to manipulate height difference using on a tile layer. The existing tile layer system would be used but the vertice will be manipulated according to the height map.
• Decoration pieces such as cans, rubbles etc often seen in games.

The height map layer and decoration pieces idea is probably very easy to implement. The one piece tile idea might be easy to do but the collision detection and game play effect would have to be considered. Also, all 3 of this ideas require an improvement on the current level editor (have to use 3D instead of 2D). Talking about the editor...another thing I should do is to move the which tile to use decision from the game into the editor probably.

I think this level design and construction in games is a huge part of game development. All the different possibilities that can be considered, and so many different ways of going about it (Gears of War, Neverwinter, Morrowwind, Starcraft level construction are all different). Even in simple things like how would you represent a "wall" in the game can have an essay behind it. I think you can actually write a book on this topics.