I've been fooling around with moving on sloped tiles in XNA and it is semi-working but not completely satisfactory. I also have been thinking that having sets of predetermined slopes might not give me terrain that looks "organic" enough. There is also the problem of having to construct several different types of tile for each slope when they're chained together (only 45 degree tiles will chain perfectly as I understand it).

I had thought of somehow scanning for connected chains of sloped tiles and treating it as a new large triangle, as I was having trouble with glitching at the edges where sloped tiles connect. But, this leads back to the problem of limiting the curvature of the terrain.

So...what I'd like to do now is create a simple image or texture of the terrain of a level (or section of the level) and generate a simple heightmap (of the Y's for each X) for the terrain. The player's Y position would then just be updated based on their X position.

Is there a simple way of doing this (or a better way of solving this problem)? The main problem I can see with this method is the case where there are areas above the ground that can be walked on. Maybe there is a way to just map all walkable ground areas?

I've been looking at this helpful bit of code: http://thirdpartyninjas.com/blog/2010/07/28/sloped-platform-collision/ but need a way to generate the actual points/vectors.