I use the Kelora 16x16 diagonal tileset, which has small dwarf 'figures' from Guybrush and plain 'flat' glyphs for everything else; and I have used it since I first played DF (2009?).
Some time back I replaced the barrel tile with a more graphic representation from Jackard which didn't seem to interfere with anything, and looked really nice with a stockpile full of barrels. But in my current fortress I have introduced screw pumps for the first time, and the animation really requires the
obelus glyph to look right, so I restored it to the original.
Lately I had been liking the look of the original tilesets, at least the dwarves smiley faces. Looking at the Kelora tileset I found the Guybrush-dwarfs to be too detailed at higher resolutions and not to really fit with a glyph-based set. (They are still good, I have just used them for so long it was time for a change). In the tileset repository I found some attempts to scale the original dwarves (such as Sapphos 16x16) but the vanilla curses_square seemed to have gotten it most right. I only saw it necessary to only change 1 pixel on the civilian dwarfs beard to take advantage of the extra resolution.
The default curses military glyph however I did't find to be distinct enough from the civilian to be easily recognizable as it mainly relies on different coloring (which is not especially obvious as dwarves can be flashing/changing colors). Many of the 16x16 helm glyphs I found to be too polished to fit in with the rest of the simple glyphs so I tried a variety of designs before finally settling on one which is actually very close to the original (changed 7 pixels, not counting the 1 pixel beard modification carried over from the civilian dwarf). Here is final design I decided to go with:
I felt like the visor needed a little bit of flair as a straight visor I thought made the dwarfs look too robotic. I messed around with some shading and sizes for the helm but eventually removed the changes until the whole beard was visible and the helm really only covered the top part. The end result is a glyph that isn't too 'bold' but preserves some character of the original dwarf glyph and is different enough to tell apart from the civilian.
Here are some of the other designs, with the final one at the end:
Most of these work reasonably well and I would consider using, but I felt the flat symmetric helms were too featureless and some of the intermediate half-helms weren't quite clear enough.
The modified Kelora set:
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Topic: New 16x16 [s]humanist[/s] dwarfist military glyph mark 9 (Read 570 times)