Or is it too complex/too much time or work to implement?
But I thought the Hitbox Height and Radius is not determined by the sprite itself ?
Replace players with giant red hitboxes and textures with shades of grey. In that way, it'd be possible to give yourself an unfair advantage in ringslinger modes if the sprites weren't required to be loaded by everybody.
Sure, there are purely decorative flowers which would work being client replaceable, but there's only so much you can do to the file loading system.
Trying to do precision platforming as Sonic with the Elemental Shield on is nerve-wracking, the shield blocks my view of the platform I'm trying to land on.
How on Earth are you having trouble precision platforming with a shield in Vanilla?
the shield blocks my view
Have you tried STRETCH ON in the console?
We have an upper limit to what we can actually support, and what shows up in the menu is usually what the game can handle on your screen. STRETCH does exactly what you'd expect it to do, stretch the visual of the game to match the screen size, but it's literally a horizontal stretch so expect some distortion.
Are you using windowed mode or fullscreen mode? According to the wiki it only does anything for the latter, and it only works when graphics are initialised on game startup.
What the stretch command does is, if you have the game set to a resolution that isn't a supported 16:10 resolution (such as 640x480), instead of letterboxing (rendering black bars) on the top and bottom, it will increase the vertical aspect ratio of the screen to fill the target resolution. The increase is purely vertical, so on a 16:9 or wider resolution it will actually decrease your viewing area. It has no effect if you're using a 16:10 resolution, and it doesn't change how SDL2 fullscreen displays the image.