Am I the only one that has problems with telling on what terrain level I currently am? For me it's very hard because terrain is practically the same. I think maybe changing terrain color could help like for example: higher = bright grass, roads; lower = dark grass, roads. Or maybe toggable classic red=high, green=low setup. What do you think?

Back in 0.4 we briefly tried darkening lower areas but it didn't do enough or it was impossible to make to fit every situation. E.g. if it was set so that you'd notice every subtle change of elevation, a big change of elevation would render half the screen black. If it was set so that big elevation looked ok, the subtle changes that also count looked like flat ground.

Currently there are isolines rendered on the terrain on specific intervals, which are darker below you and lighter above you. The line is very faint in the current build, as some people prefer to not have the isolines, and there are no controls to change it. Controls are coming once I get to expand the options menu. Here's how it looked like once http://modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles/isoline.jpg

Well, maybe it's not bad idea, but how about "not static" indicator. I mean, you can't make everyone happy so why not let people choose between isolines, or colorful terrain and maybe even "constant"/"press button to see"/"hold to see" setup.

On the other hand maybe "dynamic" indicator will work, where point 0 for indicator is always player position. If you are in front of the hill, half of it will be bright, but more you progress up the hill, it will become more normal, and field you came from will become darker and darker. When you finally are on the hill, the point 0 will be on the hill, so whole field you came from will be dark, but on this hill you will be able to tell where you can shoot and where you can hide.

The darkening back in 0.4 worked like the "dynamic" indicator you referred to. If you look at beta 0.4 videos, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3EaI3PV4hI at 0:31, you see on the upper left part a heavily darkened area as that is below the user controlled player. Using that kind of rendering in map2 near villa with the huge hill would look very bad.

As much as I'd like to add tons of alternative ways for rendering the terrain, darkening, isolines, polygon lines, texture grids, each of them needs another shader implementation and a fixed-function alternative for GPUs without shaders. All of these might have specific controllable parameters, e.g. the isolines have occurrence and intensity, which require a UI somewhere in the menus. As you can see, adding all of this requires a lot of effort, and it all becomes a maintenance and testing burden very quickly. Hence, a single solution is preferred.

The current solution is shading the terrain with directional light, simulating sun/moon, and composing the faint isolines (which will have those controls soon, as I want to see the isolines better as well) in there too. The directional light usually seems to tell enough about the terrain curvature, but sunrise/sunset are the worst, as the directional light intensity goes 0 for some time, and there are no shadows or terrain shading at all for a while. This is where the isolines should help.