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[BlackPhantom]

My Suggestion is that the engine should feature more directional tiles of various objects such as water, channels, tunnels, walls, etc.

So far, the only thing that has that feature is the smoothed wall.

By implementing more directional tiles, modders can make better graphical addons for this game.
Until then, every graphical version of dwarf fortress will look incomplete and blocky.

For those who ask: "What are directional tiles?"
I say: "Tiles that have different appearances based on their neighbouring tiles."

What do you guys think?

[Hummingbird]

Doesn't seem feasible in ASCII...

Do you mean you want to have the game track what kind of tiles each tile is adjacent to, for the benefit of people designing tilesets?

[Deimos56]

Sounds to me like that's exactly what this individual is suggesting.
...I could be wrong though.
...But if it is, could be handy.

[Granite26]

2 ways to do it that come to mind are

1: Each tile actually includes in its definition the 4(or 8.) bordering tiles, with the tileset being sophisticated enough to pick which one... It involves being able to insert a tile server between the tiles and the game, but that might not be a bad idea anyway if you used it to handle iso details as well.

2: Where multiple borders make sense, the tile is numbered by surroundings. (For example, for walls, you'd have 123-XX as the tile pointer, and XX would contain a byte with the information about what's around it.) Effectively you'd have 256 tiles for every possible tile, and the system'd need to use a 'default' tile(00) for any tile not represented

[BlackPhantom]

basically...just give water and other stuff more tiles based on what it is (corner, t-joint, intersection, etc...).
Think of how they did the smoothed wall tileset.

[Vattic]

When Toady does start work on the graphics in DF I'd like to see more context sensitive tiles which respond to the tiles around them like you suggest. There are plenty of things already in game which might be candidates for this. The one that immediately jumps to mind are veins of ore, there could be a number of different ore tiles shared between the various ores but coloured differently for each.

I did a quick animated mock-up. Obviously others could do a better job especially with the tile used for the ore.

The scraggly edges of the vein could be stored as a greyscale mask and could be combined with the texture of the surrounding rock and the ore on the fly so you wouldn't need to make new ones for each ore / rock combination.

On a similar note someone, in another topic, mentioned transitional tiles and posted the following image:


Other places where this technique might be appropriate include the boundaries between different rock types. Also digging out a room could leave the walls slightly uneven until smoothed. Smoothed walls could be more context sensitive than they are now recognising which side has been smoothed and what direction they face, knowing they are in a corner or at a junction and what junction would give more freedom to make interesting tilesets.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Something simple I threw together, not really appropriate for DF as those walls are all two tiles thick but again there are only three types of tile in the picture, un-dug, smoothed-wall and floor but the smoothed-wall is represented a number of different context sensitive ways.