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[Girlinhat]

Hmm, a spire.  I might just...

[Crazy Cow]

Woot! Built an impressive circular courtyard instead of the normal square one. I am putting the finishing touches on a second layer for defense of the pointy, long-ranged kind, and it is a bit more of a micromanagement hassle, but it looks cool. That's all that matters
A spire would be really badass-looking in any visualizer, as long as you have ramps as well (or even not).

@Lectorog:
I would appreciate that. If they are all mono-colored, it would be very easy to edit, too.

[Girlinhat]

Current idea is to have a 50 diameter ring on the ground, going up 100 levels, with a reduction once every two levels to give it a nice pointy look.  Or even 25 diameter (which is good because odd numbers tend to settle better) with a reduction every 4 levels.  I'm not entirely sure what would fit in the higher levels though...

[monk12]

This thread is relevant to my interests- that diagram in particular is gonna be mad useful, and PerfectSphere looks fancy- I'll have to dick about with it later. Thanks all!

[Starver]

While Starver went into an amazing amount of detail, I use Microsoft paint and none of the fancy button combinations worked for me.

Well, I was on an XP machine at the time.  I know that Vista/7 may have messed around with the interface a bit[1], if that's the problem.  I did give the menu items, as well, so that should have worked, or at least help you find the new way of doing it.

Right now I'm on a completely different machine, and I don't think it'd be useful to describe the method I'd use on here.


[1] I'm still annoyed that I can no longer hit the keys <Windows>, "U" and "U" to initiate a 'nice' shut down in three easy single key-presses (among many other methods that existed, and still have rough equivalents, I know...), but instead it tries to search for all programs in the start menu starting with "UU", or whatever it is that happens.

[MarcAFK]

I plan on building a huge dome, but arent sure if i want it circular or more ovoid.
I could either find a tool that'll print the whole dome in whatever sphericity i require, or i could just use something to find the right shape for each circle and then do the height by hand.

[Lectorog]

@Lectorog:
I would appreciate that. If they are all mono-colored, it would be very easy to edit, too.

I'm working on getting them uploaded to the computer, but I need help with two things:
1) A program that won't screw up all of the colors. Paint hates humanity, and auto-blends anything that resembles an edge.
2) An image hosting site. I've not used any yet, so I'll need one to upload the diagrams.
Any recommendations would be nice.

[Urist Imiknorris]

2) http://img.ie/

[CapnUrist]

1) Paint. Save as a .png file. I've had the same problem as you, and I find it's also from using the Paint program on an older version of Windows.

[Lectorog]

1) Paint. Save as a .png file. I've had the same problem as you, and I find it's also from using the Paint program on an older version of Windows.

I'm using the most recent Paint. I almost always save the images as .png's. There's still color distortion; example: making the diagrams in (full) blue with a white background, but about 1/3 - 1/2 of the pixels had their colors changed to a lighter blue. Would less pixelation (4x4 pixels per tile, or something) help fix this problem? I haven't found any way to fix this, so maybe I should get a different program.

Oh, and img.ie looks great. Thanks!

[Starver]

Sorry, I never even considered anybody would try to save such line-art as JPGs.  (To be honest, I never even considered saving the image, anyway.  I would have it alongside DF, use it purely as reference and then close it unsaved, however, given that some people would want to...)

For saving, PNGs FTW, though (or, for less colour depth, GIF or even for monochrome a compressed form of bitmap or other).  Older versions of Windows may or may not have Paint able to save as that, so you'd then be falling back to the GIF (yeah, I know about the historic patent issue!) or BMP formats.  The latter being a totally inefficient save format, and often (not always!) uncompressed, but then who's bothered about a few MB here or there, these days..

But never JPG.

My camera saves in a JPEG format (JPEG/JFIF, to be more precise) and wish I could afford to switch it to save as raw, but then I couldn't take as many photos before having to change memory cards), but after editing the pictures (usually lowering the final resolution, so losing most of the artefacts while doing that) I'd almost exclusively save them as PNGs if they were just for viewing.  Despite there being a better compression rate in under the JPEG system (and tunable in that regard) and that real-life images have smooth transitions that work very well with the DCT algorithm without it being so obvious.

So, back to building round buildings, are then taking the above into consideration, perhaps I should take a picture of something, down-convert it into a lower-resolution 16-colour dithered equivalent image and then carefully build a fort resembling that layout of pixels, with various walls/floors/etc being made of cinnabar, cobaltite, kimberlite, olivine, etc, in order to get something that (at least when zoomed out) looks remarkably like the image...