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Extended ASCII (Original)

Tilesets (Mayday DFG for instance)

Other (Custom ASCII tiles, etc.)

[Fedor]

I play with a square tileset; Mayday or something fairly similar.

Square characters are *extremely* important to me because, when I make a room of a certain shape, I want to it to look like that shape and not distorted.  When it's time to get artistic a rectangular character set doesn't do justice to the art and, when it's time to optimize movement efficiency, having dwarves move faster up-down than left-right just won't do.

I don't use the included 16x16 ASCII tileset.  Its blocky, distorted, pixelated letters makes any fort look ugly, and any text hard to read.  The forcible intrusion of CGA-era ASCII on my DF experience breaks immersion hard. 



ASCII, why do I not love thee?  Let me count the ways.

You force me to represent a diversity of game objects in 256 characters.  A glass portal, a pillar, a wall ending, and a giant Olm are not the same, and should not look the same.

You force a variety of dwarves to show the same character and color.  When I'm looking for my Cook, I don't want to play "guess which brown face you want".

You can't be made to display background information or extra data except by doing something hideous, like changing background color or obnoxious, like blinking.  You have an 80-column mind about displaying information, which makes me press more keys to see the info I need to play the game.

In short, ASCII, you're the hovel in which my gaming experience was born.  No matter how my memory becomes rose-tinted with time, you're still a hovel, and I'm glad I don't have to game with you any more.

[Solarn]

ASCII all the way for me. It's clean, very visible and allows me to parse everything much faster than any tileset would. I understand that it's the opposite for some people, but I think anyone who whines about how the game is unplayable without tilesets seriously needs to learn how to play games.

Besides, fancy graphics would distract me from the gameplay, which in DF is a very bad thing indeed.

Really?  How would nicer graphics distract you from the gameplay?  If anything I would think it would do the opposite.  And I don't think that people who don't want to play in ASCII need to learn to play games.   Wanting something a bit more immersive than some random symbols and letters doesn't make you bad at playing games, it makes you bad at memorizing arbitrary meanings of random symbols and letters. 



I actually think the ASCII people should give the tilesets a chance, nothing wrong with making things look a little nicer.

Nice graphics = attracts the eye = attracts the eye away from the magma breach killing my dwarves. Also, I have yet to see a tileset that keeps the nice black background color that makes everything so visible. They are way too colorful.

Memorizing what symbol means what in DF isn't all that hard. People are just lazy. I will not acknowledge laziness as an excuse. As I said, I understand if people find it easier to play with tilesets. I just don't understand if they say default DF is unplayable.

Besides, wanting games to be more "immersive" is just a cheap excuse not to use your imagination.

[slink]

Custom ASCII here.  Tileset_unknown_960x300_02 in windowed 960 x 600, to be specific.  I have tried some other square ASCII sets but I don't like some of the changes they make.  I did also try playing with some graphics (mkv_solidcurses_stairs_960x300 and mordae) but I still prefer the ASCII.  I found it too difficult to see the tiny graphics.  When I want an eye-candy fix, I fire up Stonesense, Visual Fortress, or some other external program made for viewing DF fortresses.

[lastofthelight]

Mayday for now, Mayday for EVER!

[Diablous]

I prefer ASCII. I have grown attached to it.

[CobaltKobold]

I don't like DFG for that it yoinks a few sprites. I use the larger curses (10x24) or my own tilesets (usually the digitiles), which really just restyle the same patterns.

I sought out DF because it had 1. 3 dimensions in a serious way (not like using stairs to utterly separate levels) and 2. was a roguelike. With ASCII graphics.

Mayday all the way. While graphics aren't the most important thing in a game, I like being able to tell at a quick glance what's going on and there's no way I'd bother with this game if there wasn't the graphics set options. What can I say? My 'minimum graphics threshold" is at original gameboy era graphics; any lower than that and I'll pass.

You give me an idea for conversion colors which would look hilariously neat with one of my tilesets. It would make it much harder to discern things though.

P.S. ASCII is the first 128. The other 128 "extended ASCII" make it specifically Codepage 437.

For me it boils down to: Why would I want my game to look worse, when I could just as easily have it look better?

For most of us who agree with Toady, it's:
Why would we want it to look better when it could play better? I don't think he should work on making gr

Looks like it's staying tied, not counting that odd third vote.

I use this: http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/File:Bisasam_24x24.png

Or to summarise:

[snip]
 INTRODUCING DORF FORTREZZ HDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
[snip]

...Seriously? I wouldn't play the game with that thing, even if the link worked.

Ivan has dynamic creature body damage where you can see how many limbs are left, you can also see which limb is covered in which fluid ( a cool feature that can be represented by the tiles is that see  zombies can  pick up and attach heads back to themselves, in fact they can use anybody's head )  and overall the graphics are just aesthetically nice. If someone works out graphics that are that good I will definitely use them but until then I am happy with ASCII.

It is feasible certainly, but you'd need to composite the creature up when drawing it. (Also, it's tricky to do custom critter draw-orders. I've been thinking about it a while.)

So the first order of business would be to
 Use a tileset of far more than 16x16 icons for... graphics.

Even better: assign a "graphics" key to the creature list so every creature would load the unique file defined there.

...this is how graphics sets work in DF,right now. Creatures, if nothing else, pretty much look however you like. They're the only thing that does. >,,>

People on laptops have to use the Fn key to scroll in some menus.

Rebind your secondscroll keys to -=[]. It's not hard, and mentioned in every DF tutorial I know of.

[smokingwreckage]

I like graphics and I use 'em. Much easier to read, for me personally, but you'll note different people process that kind of information in different ways. Multicoloured letters are a nightmare due to some specifics regarding how I process text. I'm not alone, a lot of people process text this way, especially guys. This isn't a pissing contest. It's just what I like. I also like my wife a lot, and you're not allowed to, which I think establishes that not only is it OK for you to not like what I do, sometimes it's polite.

If I never again have to look at a blinking letter, it will still be too soon. Everything I have said about preferences and who likes what falls apart at this point. Only disgusting, subhuman, degenerate perverts like blinking text, that is an established fact.

Finally, when full graphics support arrives - meaning that in-game information will no longer be abridged to meet the limits of ASCII, as it is now - I am very hopeful of seeing a lot more data at once. There's a lot of untapped potential to smoothly and rapidly represent a great deal of game data while the game runs rather than hiding it behind menus and pauses. We'll see this not only through clever visual representation of info but as greatly expanded and more flexible use of text once it is no longer doing double-duty as graphics. Some people will certainly feel like this distracts from game depth, but actually it will not except in an emotional sense. Logically the depth will remain identical.