This is exciting indeed. So it looks like you can divide all types of objects into two groups: single-tile (e.g. trees, dwarves, rocks, water) and multi-tile (e.g. ballistae, ballista arrows, catapults, pumps, windmills, workshops).
From there you can further divide the single-tile group based on how they are affected by the
Shading Paradigm Shift:
-remains single tile with no modification: (e.g. creatures, containers)
-remains single tile, but with modification based on surrounding tiles: (water-land transitions, double doors)
-is extended to multiple tiles: (megabeasts, trees)
One issue I see with some of the extended graphics is that sometimes the original anchor tile will be obscured (a dwarf walking through a door, combat).
-With single-tile reactive-behavior objects, this would usually cause the tile to change to another form (a dwarf walking through a double door would make the other side a single door).
-With single-tile extended objects, it just causes the disappearance of a larger entity (a larger dragon disappears when covered by a dwarf tile in combat).
Trees don't suffer from any of these effects because they aren't reactive and can't be displaced by a creature, provided you can make adjacent trees overlay well.
With multi-tile objects, you have:
-non-interactive (windmills)
-interactive (siege weapons, workshops)
But none of these (that I know of) suffer from same problems because you should be able to display them the same way whether or not they have arrows or dwarves in them, especially since there are very few existent interactions.
So at this point it's definitely looking like the most difficult issues (before the actual artwork, of course
) can be made completely irrelevant by multiple passes providing the information about all objects in a tile, not just the visible one.
It would also open up a slew of possibilities! For example! I know that up until now we have no canonical evidence for dwarven knees, but
what if they could sit down?