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[Lemunde]

I pride myself on having a vivid imagination but I can only look at oblong ascii graphics for so long before I want to tear my eyes out.  But the Mayday tileset goes a long way to make the game playable for me.  So things are fine the way they are right now.  Let Toady worry about the gameplay and let other people create the artwork.  It's a pretty good system.  A little more support for tilesets would be nice.  Simply expanding the number of tiles and colors would go a long way.

But let's face it, you're not going to get very many people to play Dwarf Fortress by showing them a screen shot that looks like someone took a sledge hammer to a Commodore keyboard.  They need at least something that tells them what is going on at a glance without having to dig through the wiki for several hours.

[Intelligent Shade of Blue]

I do agree that the game's interface/accessibility could be improved upon, but it is at least functional at the moment while Toady continues to expand the mechanics of the game itself. I get the impression that Toady himself is not inclined towards visual art and layout, so it's only natural for the UI to be put to the side. Just like Baughn's work on the 40d# graphics stuff, I think the UI is something that Toady could potentially get help with without messing up his and ThreeToe's grand vision for the game itself.

In any case, though, pretty much all Roguelikes have strange interface quirks, and DF's aren't bad enough to make it unplayable or unfun.

[Afterburner]

Hey I didn't know anyone used my tileset

Well, technically I use a modified version of your tileset.  See here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I like your graphics, but I liked another letter font better.  So I did some cut-n-paste and added different letters to your graphics.  Also changed the stockpile and animal trap graphics.    But I still think of it as your tileset, because almost everything I see in the game is from your original tileset.

[Squirrelloid]

Personally I think it would be nice if the mayday graphics pack was linked from the main site: it does make it easier to see what things are.

Heh.  I only get confused when i see graphical tilesets.  I keep going 'wtf is all that'.  It looks like someone rainbow barfed on my screen.  Probably because it turns stuff like ground symbols and other entities into full tile color patches, so they just seem to blend together more.

It certainly helps that I played a bunch of angband variants before discovering DF.  My biggest complaint about DF 'graphics' is that the letter encoding is poorly chosen - if you're going to have a heirarchical data representation style of graphics, you should actually use it to convey heirarchical meaning.  (Ie, creatures should be represented by a letter that describes type and a color that describes species.  So a yellow 'f' might be a (feline) lion).

Yes, i did recode all the ASCII in .40d.  Thinking about doing it for the new version too, as soon as we have a stable version.

[Spreggo]

I'm glad someone is making good use of it. I'm working on another one now but I'm not sure if I'm going to do a diagonal wall version.

[Afterburner]

I'm glad someone is making good use of it. I'm working on another one now but I'm not sure if I'm going to do a diagonal wall version.

Well, if my vote counts, I vote for diagonal walls.  That's why I use yours in the first place.

[Mishy]

Bronzemurder

Oh my god. That was awesome.

[carebear]

Personally I think it would be nice if the mayday graphics pack was linked from the main site: it does make it easier to see what things are.

I think Toady should stay away from promoting any graphics packs in particular. Otherwise it might give the impression that it is an official pack for Dwarf Fortress that has his support, rather than a fanmade addition which it really is, or that the game is supposed to be played with a graphics pack.

Aside from that it's not really fair against the other equally good packs out there.

[warhammer651]

Bronzemurder

Oh my god. That was awesome.

Absolutely epic.

the Boatmurdered of DF 2010