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[Aquillion]

I was looking at some of the screenshots of the new 3D areas and thinking about ways Dwarf Fortress could portray depth effectively when it struck me--there are already games that do this sort of thing.  The old Legend of Zelda titles did, for instance.

Why not do what they did and eventually use parallax scrolling, based on the movement of the screen?  Sure, it's tricky, but the effect would be very beautiful and could fit within the existing look and feel of the game.

Now, how could parallax scrolling be done while preserving tiles?  Easy!  Take tiles that are 'lower' in the distance, reduce the size of their symbols, and make them a bit darker.  Then, just move the reduced symbol within its tile (in the extra space created by reducing it) to produce a parallax effect...  using this, the appearance of 3D depth could be produced using nothing but a bit of animation within Dwarf Fortress' existing ascii tile system.

Just a thought, anyway.  I know it's sort of crazy, but I think it would make anyone who saw it for the first time stop with a 'woah!', and would make it much easier to see what's going on in a layered environment.

[ July 12, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Fieari]

The display engine would have to be rewritten first.  Toady has said he will be doing so eventually, so this is a good idea to hold onto for then, but it'll be a little while, I'm sure.

I definitely agree, by the way.

While he's at it, smooth scrolling should also be possible, which would make the paralax more obvious too.

[ July 12, 2007: Message edited by: Fieari ]

[Core Xii]

Hm, there is some idea in that.

I don't think it would require much of an engine rewrite, really. All you have is a couple more surfaces that are drawn scaled and blended. Big deal.

[Toady One]

I don't quite understand this.  The tile is 8x12 in the default window.  Is there enough space to work with here, if all of the shrinking and movement occurs within the individual tiles?

[Aquillion]

Hrm.  Probably not enough if you want to keep them identifiable...  but even reducing tiles down to a tiny featureless 4x4 pixel (or smaller) colored specks might be enough to keep the general sense of what's below.  You could see where walls and floors are, say; where water is; and where moving things are.  There would be enough room to scroll them a bit if you reduced things that small.

Sure, you couldn't tell the difference between a dwarf and a table at a glance, but you wouldn't have to, and in a way that would be realistic...  it looks like you're doing this already to an extent, but you could use different-sized specks and faked parallax scrolling to represent more layers at once.

[ July 12, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Core Xii]

I can't stop thinking about looking down a well, seeing a glimpse of the dwarfs accessing it on the levels below, and the bucket traveling up and down.

[Toady One]

It wasn't identifiability, but the distinctions between the layers that's important.  But even that is sort of irrelevant I guess, if you're losing the ability to tell what's in a square and just going for a visual effect.  The idea behind some of the line style visuals is to display the tiles in the same way as main level tiles but maintain altitude information by displaying cliff faces as a line between tiles.  The parallax idea would be a way to augment the current display by removing the blue sky parts and putting lower level there instead, but I wonder if lines is really the way to go, since you can convey all of the levels at full detail.  Not sure how it'll look though.  It'll depend in part on how easy the game is to play with the currently restricted information I suppose.