Programming » Engine Architecture - Background Managment

We'd also maybe need more layers that are in the foreground that can cover things in between (so the character can walk "in between" and can be covered, like railing of the staircase at the beginning of Toonstruck 1). But that is of course no problem in your approach.

A problem might be flying things - the depth-collision-map assumes that characters always walk on the floor and the scale is dependent on the position of the characters "feet" on that greyscale image.

How is this done in other engines (like adventuregamestudio or Wintermute engine)?

What are the recent plans about an engine anyway? Create an own engine? If so, which language etc?
Another option may be to use the Wintermute engine and port it to other platforms like Linux. The homepage says that the code is available on request under terms of the LGPL2, so this might be a possibility.
I don't know how clean and portable the code is, though.

maybe you want some kind of flying birds or fill flux with helium so he can hover to some otherwise unreachable place or ...

Maybe they need no collision map but IMHO it would be desirable to be able to handle all kind of non-static stuff (and their scale) with this approach. For example flying NPCs (like King Hugh in the cutifier).

Anyway: the idea really isn't too bad, but you should really dig into some available engines (just the editing tools should be sufficient) to see how things are usually done. Even if you/we/whoever ( ;) ) write a custom engine for Toonstruck 2 this should give you some good inspiration.

I don't think we really need flying things, cuase we could make it like in TS1 were all the complex animations/action like flying scenes or the intro/outro are presented in a small movieclip (the .smk files)