Bay 12 Games Forum

Any chance you'd look at expanding the official merch? I'd like a mug. I'd like to support you! I don't want one with ripped-off art on Redbubble. An official mug would be very nice, because I drink a lot of tea. I drink a lot, I mean, relatively speaking, so maybe a beer glass too? Dwarven beer obviously.

As a long-term player, I would like to move the map with 8426, choose an action (chop trees, build nest box, whatever), and use the same keys 8426 to move the cursor. This modal use of the same keys was present in 0.47 but seems to be unavailable in the Steam version. In the Steam version (which I enjoy immensely), if I bind map move and cursor move to the same keys, this is the behaviour: If I choose build nest box, and move the cursor, the map also moves, which while being slightly amusing, makes it impossible to use the same hotkeys. In 0.47 these two actions, map moving and cursor moving, were mutually exclusive. It meant that one could use the same hotkeys for these two actions. This meant that I could do something like this: move map 8426, dt, move cursor 8426, choose area, esc, move map 8426, bwl, move cursor 8426, build workshop, esc, move map 8426... and so on. I'm using the same keys so I'm not jumping around with my right hand or using a modifier with my left.

The Steam version is great! It has great music, QOL features, amazing art. And nearly there with the hotkeys. But not quite. This change would bring back that familiar flying-around-the-menus-at-speed-of-thought that was one of the things that was so immensely pleasurable in the legacy version.

(edit) well, there are other things to get there of course, like hitting i to inspect, q to focus a workshop or whatever... But I think that will come with time. It seemed to me that the above topic I waffled about was an omission in the fundamentals as opposed to an omission in the features, so to speak.

(edit edit) this is mostly because I want to get rid of wasd so I can hotkey with the left hand, perhaps a hybrid approach would be appropriate whereby map scrolling is just used intermittently with the middle mouse button, instead of trying to go full keyboard with a UI that clearly isn't designed like those old ncurses command line apps anymore. Well, there's lots of approaches and opinions probably.

I have this idea of messing about with Aseprite for many cold autumn / winter evenings. I want to work on something great and umbral for this game. What do I need to know? Are there resources around for people who want to start making tilesets for this game? Or should I start by hacking one? Which one?

I'm making a colour palette. How many colours does DF support? DF Wiki talks about colour schemes in 16 colours.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Color_scheme

But Spacefox has many, many colours in its art folder. This is confusing me.

I'm a bit confused at the distinction of tileset and graphics set. Does the tileset just replace the ASCII characters and the graphics set does separate graphics for creatures and so on? So... do all graphics sets use a tileset also? Are they two different things, both of which are needed? How does the game apply a particular graphic from a graphics set to a creature, if it only has 100+ ASCII characters to choose from? Is there a piece of logic that says Hoary Marmot = this bit of a sprite sheet?

And... I see existing tilesets keep the letters a-z. Is this so that in-game text is rendered correctly? But I thought that TWBT did that, so can I use the full set of characters to make a tileset? And how do graphics sets integrate with TWBT, is that a prerequisite as well?

As you can see, I'm confused, and apologetic, for my many noobish questions. I have to emphasise that I'm not averse to reading the wikis and documentation sites in any way... But it's all very deep and long and I just needed a "quickstart fort" guide but, uh, for graphics sets and tilesets.