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Author Topic: DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer  (Read 1790 times)

halftime

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DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer
« on: June 23, 2010, 07:10:19 pm »

If you're like me, then you love how Dwarf Fortress gives you detailed text descriptions of, well, pretty much everything. Unfortunately, if you're like me, you also have no idea what color "raw umber" is, let alone how it differs from "burnt umber" (or "burnt sienna", or any of the seven varieties of "taupe" the game uses). This makes some of the descriptions frustratingly difficult to visualize.

To combat this problem, I've thrown together a little toy that lets you see how the colors in a dwarf's description text might actually look. Behold!

I'm curious as to whether anyone else thinks this is a good idea, and if so, what they'd like me to add to it next. Obviously there's a lot more I could do, given the level of detail in the descriptions.

Also, I'd appreciate any advice or help with the "artistic" aspects of this project... I basically played around with the SVG elements until they looked like something roughly approximating a face. :P

Also also, it would be awesome if anybody with 1337 memory-hacking skills wanted to help me figure out a way to automatically extract descriptions from a save file and make portraits of all your dwarfs...

Anyway, take a look, and let me know what you think. :)
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LordNagash

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Re: DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2010, 07:21:09 pm »

My suggestion would be to look into using DFHack, as it already has the memory hacking done for you. You can see it in action in Stonesense, where dwarves will actually vary appearance based on their descriptions.

Which is one of my favourite features of Stonesense, actually. It would be nice if it could be built into a separate program that wasn't working with tiny dwarf sprites
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Vattic

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Re: DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer
« Reply #2 on: June 24, 2010, 04:37:14 am »

I think this is a really neat idea. A guy called Kennel made something similar a good while back called dwarf portrait maker. Worth looking into for inspiration at least.

Edit to add: One thing I like about your's over his is that your's is using the same colours as the descriptions in game. Kennel's was made before such detailed descriptions.
« Last Edit: June 24, 2010, 04:39:17 am by Vattic »
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Crunch

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Re: DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer
« Reply #3 on: June 24, 2010, 03:00:33 pm »

Dude - totally awesome!  I love how you've done it all in SVG.

Here's a little bit of mediocre shading that might help out a bit.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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Renault

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Re: DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer
« Reply #4 on: June 24, 2010, 04:23:20 pm »

Oh, this thing is awesome. You know, at first I was thinking it would be cool if it was worked into the game, then I remembered ASCII. Heh.
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BodyGripper

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Re: DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer
« Reply #5 on: June 24, 2010, 08:36:24 pm »

I like it!
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Lord Herman

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Re: DorfMaker - A dwarf visualizer
« Reply #6 on: June 28, 2010, 05:58:09 am »

Lord Herman likes DorfMaker for its niftyness.

A next step could be to include the other parameters for facial shape and features that the game provides.
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