Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Starver]

[Ninjed while dragged away from my console, it seems]

The different weapon-class of military (home-side, allied/peaceful escorts and hostiles, all) are coloured according to weapon speciality, much as the different (primary) trade-class of civilian is, when it comes to dwarven civvies.  The leaders of opposing armies are generally the ones in the 'bright' version of the colour, in amongst the duller (and often other-weapon, therefore other-colour) members who compose their subordinate unit.

For example, a commanding officer might be bright green (bow-goblin, or similar) in amongst a set of hammergoblins, swordgoblins, speargoblins, whatever, and it's immediately obvious (unless mingling with another unit, or three) who is leader, what weaponry shall be imminently be brought to bear, etc, by colour.

There's points of ambiguity, and especially potential confusion between the red-classed enemy goblins and the goslings, etc, as I've already mentioned at least once in this thread, but (as also already mentioned) when the goblins are in the midst of your goslings you're either not so bothered about the imminently-slaughtered goslings (maybe you have other things to worry about) or are in the midst of micromanaging with the unit-(v)iew key or the (s)quad-view one, or similar, and are thus largely in pause-mode and have the wherewithal to fill in the unknowns.

As far as I can see, unknowns that the tilesets don't do too much more to help[1] (even assuming you can tell the difference between a sword-wielder and a large-dagger wielder, which I would hope you could), albeit that Stonesense seems to be quite capable of conglomerating a whole lot of otherwise not-on-show data into its display, as just mentioned.


[1] Give a little, take a little.  Some confusions removed, others may be added (without an exagerated quantity of the pixels devoted to the weapon-type, perhaps), like I said, I'm used to vanilla and (like I haven't said) I know a lot of the tilesets have been lovingly crafted by their respective artist-creators and there are some things I do like

[inEQUALITY]

(Disclaimer: mostly talking about graphics packs here in my post)

I admire the detail and underappreciated beauty of many tilesets, and respect the time put into them. I absolutely love sprite work. It's always been my favorite form of computer graphics, especially when done well.

However, I refuse to use them for Dwarf Fortress. For me they only add to my confusion at the best of times, and they really break my immersion from the game.

1) Confusion: Let's point out the obvious; tilesets often try to make things look like what it represents, but in doing so, causes weird situations where it's NOT what it's supposed to represent. This has already been covered earlier in this thread. It seems to me that I would just prefer a symbol that I will ALWAYS be able to instantly glance at and, according to context, be able to figure out. But when the tileset is TELLING me that something is something entirely different, it breaks immersion.

2) Immersion: For me, any game with graphics needs very appealing (read: aesthetically pleasing, not necessarily realistic) graphics to keep me immersed. Kingdom Hearts, with it's almost anime-3D style was appealing for its time, and kept me immersed. Mass Effect (sometimes 1, and sometimes 2), with its broad and epic tale of the future, had the graphics to match 99% of the time to keep me immersed. But tilesets? It's just not 'good enough'. There is a HUGE level of detail in the game for descriptions of appearances, inventories, equipment, actions, etc.

But with tilesets, all of that is lost. You're telling me that that blonde-haired elf sprite there is ACTUALLY bald, missing an arm and an eye, and bleeding to death? Don't buy it. It's far too literal. However, ASCII is immediately open for interpretation; it's not telling you that the little 'g' is a goblin swordsman with no nose and scars all over his arms, it gives you the bare minimum for your interpretation of details. If you want to know more, then you read a description. Imagination takes over. You're more immersed. In a way, I could cover all of this in a third category of 'accuracy vs abstraction', how sprites attempt to feign accuracy when they're not and ASCII only demonstrates abstraction, which it excels at.

That's how it is for me anyway. I wonder how the numbers of people who prefer ASCII to prefer graphics packs reflect the numbers of players with high levels of creativity/imagination vs those with low levels of it. Not meaning to be insulting, just a genuine thought, as I know all kinds of people do enjoy Dwarf Fortress. I'd never argue against having graphics packs, mind you, it's important that people who otherwise would never have played get to play, because this game is simply amazing. But graphics packs are just SO not for me; it's turned me off from a small handful of roguelikes that I've tried and otherwise would have liked.

[Isher]

Thanks everyone,

On my next playthrough, which will be soon as though I embarked on an area with multiple shallow and deep metals I appear to be missing iron ores which always bores me to tears, I will give ascii another shot. One reason I went away from it was that on adventure mode I couldn't tell what the hell was supposed to be represented on all the different maps, and in dwarf mode that is not such an issue.

I totally see what people are saying, and I'm glad I went through this thread, for as long as that information is at least available and all I have to do is learn the matrix (sorry for the cliche), I will be happy to do so.

1) Confusion: Let's point out the obvious; tilesets often try to make things look like what it represents, but in doing so, causes weird situations where it's NOT what it's supposed to represent.
2) But with tilesets, all of that is lost. You're telling me that that blonde-haired elf sprite there is ACTUALLY bald, missing an arm and an eye, and bleeding to death? Don't buy it. It's far too literal. However, ASCII is immediately open for interpretation; it's not telling you that the little 'g' is a goblin swordsman with no nose, it gives you the bare minimum. If you want to know more, then you read a description. Imagination takes over. You're more immersed. In a way, I could cover all of this in a third category of 'accuracy vs abstraction', how sprites attempt to feign accuracy when they're not and ASCII only demonstrates abstraction, which it excels at.

Those are two extremely good points that I had not considered before (I skimmed some earlier posts but missed these points, and they are stated very clearly here

As a lot of people say, the graphics packs can sometimes get it wrong. I like phoebus but I swear yesterday I saw some bat people and some ravens that looked remarkably similar. I have a big complaint with the raven sprite. It looked so damn huge, and also not black - and of course scared the shit out of me before I k'd it and realized what it was - and yeah it killed immersion.

I wonder how the numbers of people who prefer ASCII to prefer graphics packs reflect the numbers of players with high levels of creativity/imagination vs those with low levels of it. Not meaning to be insulting, just a genuine thought, as I know all kinds of people do enjoy Dwarf Fortress.

I think there may be something to that as some people have already said here in this thread that they like tilesets to fill in some blanks. However, I think for a lot of people it is simply an attempt to learn the fundamentals of the game without first having to learn what the hell the difference is between all the colored g's and etc., and if they'd give it a shot like I'm about to do (and as people here have said, they started on graphics packs, and as you have said, it opens it up for new players to start) they'll eventually find that the matrix works better. 

Honestly I started on graphics packs when I got in a fight with goblins amongst some geese, and I was constantly freakin' out about geese being outside my fortress after that.

Now that I know for sure that the information is all there for me and that some things are actually more clear with ascii, I'll be glad to do it simply for utilitarian reasons.

[Alastar]

Some good points. Also, to me quality of implementation is important... much more so than sophistication of a technical standard.

Can't do something in (actual graphics, colours, high resolution, 3d, whatever fancy technology) well without overtaxing hardware or making serious design concessions? Don't, and pick something that you can do well.
Dwarf Fortress in high ASCII may not be conventionally pretty, but it uses the standard so well it's pleasing to look at (excellently chosen characters, the animations are an unexpected delight in context). Some VGA games still look beautiful and sound great to me. Many early 3d games looked terrible to me even when they received praise for their graphics. Many modern games look fine to me in screenshots but fall apart during actual gameplay: Animation, voice acting and some details are jarringly substandard or repetitive.

Designing a tileset that doesn't feed the player misleading information, looks good, and is usable across a reasonable range of zoom levels seems a tall order. And if the game claims proper graphics, I cease to be amused by clever ways to do simple animation and become irritated that it's not smoother.

[Courtesy Arloban]

I use my own tileset that started out as a gimp depth merge of every tileset out at the time and borrowed sprites from ultima 5.

Tilesets still use letters to represent creatures, and there are two graphic packs that do so as well.  In fact with a graphic pack you can add diacritic marks to letters that don't have an equivalent in the code page DF uses.  Giving you a letter d to see that it is a dog and a greve to see that it is trained war!  The donkey can be a capital D with an acute to see that its a hunter, and a dragon could be a script(cursive) D to show that it is a megabeast.

[Isher]

I use my own tileset that started out as a gimp depth merge of every tileset out at the time and borrowed sprites from ultima 5.

Tilesets still use letters to represent creatures, and there are two graphic packs that do so as well.  In fact with a graphic pack you can add diacritic marks to letters that don't have an equivalent in the code page DF uses.  Giving you a letter d to see that it is a dog and a greve to see that it is trained war!  The donkey can be a capital D with an acute to see that its a hunter, and a dragon could be a script(cursive) D to show that it is a megabeast.

Release it!

[wuphonsreach]

Wow, you're right, it does look nice. I might install it. Another reason I don't like tilesets is because things like Phoebus make things like description text look really weird.

Yes, the description mode still doesn't play nicely with graphical tile sets - but it's more that descriptions don't use TrueType mode.  I've found that if you set the graphics mode to "2D" (or maybe the 2D sync), the TrueType stuff works fine.  But if you set the graphics mode to "STANDARD", then the TrueType stuff breaks.

I'm currently using Phoebus as it was similar enough to May Green's tileset.  I've tried a few times to play with ASCII mode, but just can't pull it off.