width/height. top down view sim. depth

[everfornever]

Hi guys.

Well I just finished up some jobs and now begining back progress on my top down rpg, I have got alot done, but now I am running into some tricky things with my maps.

First, I wont get into alot of stuff or reasons why I am doing certain things, but here is my question.

I want my maps to be hilly, you can see by the picture below.



and I am trying to think of ways to increase/decrease player size depending on the hills on my flat map.

now one Idea, pretty much the only idea I had so far was something like this.

create either a black and white or color layer to lay under my maps, and use some sort of get color method to see what color player is standing on, I figured go black and white so I could use something like....

if color is increased so is player scale, and if color is decreased so is player scale...

anyone ever attempted anything like this before?

here is an example of the above tile map with what I am talking about.


I know I would have to get more precise, but this is just an example

Now to me this sounds like the most logical way of doing such a thing but thought maybie someone here as tried this before?

any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated,,,, thank you.