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[Lee72]

I was looking for a tileset tutorial on youtube and here, but can't seem to find anything!
Anyone know of one?

[Klitri]

Im pretty sure (Dont qoute me on this) that you move the tileset into the art folder. But again I might probally be horribly wrong..

Im wrong. If your getting phoebus, it comes with an automatic graphic intilzer. Just move it all into the folder where your exe and whatnot is.

[Lee72]

Im pretty sure (Dont qoute me on this) that you move the tileset into the art folder. But again I might probally be horribly wrong..

Im wrong. If your getting phoebus, it comes with an automatic graphic intilzer. Just move it all into the folder where your exe and whatnot is.

I'm looking to draw/amend a tileset in gimp or something!

[CLA]

Ah so you're looking into making your own tileset then, right?
Just an ASCII-like tileset or a graphic pack complete with creature graphics like phoebus, ironhand or mayday?

In either case, you'll need an image editor that supports transparency, like gimp or photoshop. Assuming you more or less know your way with these, it's actually pretty easy.

DF works like this:

There's a background color and a foreground color. All tiles get assigned a foreground color, some get a background color, too. If the tile doesn't get a background color from the game, the background will be shown as black.
In the tileset, everything that's transparent is background, everything that's white is foreground. A 50% transparent white will have foreground color mixed with background color. Grey will make the foreground darker.
Black will make it just that - black.

It's the easiest to start with editing an existing tileset.

the image will need to be a png with preserved transparency, and have these dimensions:
16*<your desired tile size> in x and y

So if you want your tiles to be 16x16 pixels, the tileset needs to be 256x256 pixels.
For 18x18 tiles  you need a 288x288px image (16*18 = 288).


some meanings of tiles can be changed (in data/init/init.txt and in the raws), but not all.

here are some useful links

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Tileset
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Color

[Lee72]

Ah so you're looking into making your own tileset then, right?
Just an ASCII-like tileset or a graphic pack complete with creature graphics like phoebus, ironhand or mayday?

In either case, you'll need an image editor that supports transparency, like gimp or photoshop. Assuming you more or less know your way with these, it's actually pretty easy.

DF works like this:

There's a background color and a foreground color. All tiles get assigned a foreground color, some get a background color, too. If the tile doesn't get a background color from the game, the background will be shown as black.
In the tileset, everything that's transparent is background, everything that's white is foreground. A 50% transparent white will have foreground color mixed with background color. Grey will make the foreground darker.
Black will make it just that - black.

It's the easiest to start with editing an existing tileset.

the image will need to be a png with preserved transparency, and have these dimensions:
16*<your desired tile size> in x and y

So if you want your tiles to be 16x16 pixels, the tileset needs to be 256x256 pixels.
For 18x18 tiles  you need a 288x288px image (16*18 = 288).


some meanings of tiles can be changed (in data/init/init.txt and in the raws), but not all.

here are some useful links

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Tileset
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Color

Thanks for the advice. I will have a play around with gimp!
You have one of the best graphic sets around! Why not do a YouTube tutorial for beginners?

[CLA]

Thanks for the advice. I will have a play around with gimp!
You have one of the best graphic sets around! Why not do a YouTube tutorial for beginners?

Thanks, but if anything I'll write up a tutorial with a few images instead of a video. Though I'm a little too busy to invest time into writing an extensive tutorial at the moment. And I don't think I'm that well versed in DF graphics. There are people much more experienced than me.

Oh another thing I forgot to mention, you should be aware that there is a "hierarchy" or two "layers" when talking about DF visuals (or visuals of similar games):

One is recognizing single tiles of course, which is straightforward to achieve.

Before that, however, you have to recognize the "structure", or "organization" of the scene presented. In other words, you should be able to see at first glance how the rooms are divided, what stockpiles are and where there's only floor. You should be able to differentiate between the current z-level, the one below, and ones even further below easily.

Kind of when you would zoom out, you should still be able to make out rooms, geography, and so on.
Even further, if possible, being able to discern creatures from items/floors helps with playing, too.

The most important thing to consider in that regard is that you should make sure walls are very different from floors (both smooth and engraved), Floors should be rather unobtrusive, low-key, walls should be easily to identify. and vegetation blends in with grass without becoming invisible. In ASCII-like tilesets, the mass of black with all the tiny punctuation in the middle can make it harder to identify things because it clutters up the view and everything seems to blend together. Though the walls usually stick out fine. With very detailed tilesets, on the other hand it might happen that the walls drown amongst the other tiles (although the three "big" graphic sets Ironhand, Mayday, and Phoebus don't have that problem).