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[Yoink]

Ohhh, okay. Great!

*Is reassured, and feels a deep shame for ever having doubted the Great Toad's brilliance*

[CLA]

Huh... I don't really like this either, myself.
Couldn't there just be, I don't know, a generic ASCII symbol which is used to denote some kindof track, (nothing big or glaring, just a '*' or something admist the ground tiles of the same colour) and then 'l'ooking at said track displays what kind of track it is, and which way it is going?

The sneaking mechanics sound interesting, but I don't like the idea of these new tiles at all.

Don't misunderstand, as toady said, this isn't a single tile you will find on the floor. This is a composite image of several tiles (219 to 223 and 254, basically the ballista 'bow' tiles) that will - presumably - appear as a popup window like, the forgotten beast popup for example.

[monk12]

But these footprints basically = manually pixel painting a sprite for each creature. There's hundred of creatures. Whenever a new one gets added, new footprint would have to be manually painted. What's the point?

If we go with that, the six tiles used will be remappable, so affected tileset users should still get a decent effect (even if they map everything to one on/off tile).

So yeah, I read it as "six generic tiles" not "hundreds of unique tiles," with your tracking skill giving you the more detailed information.

I'm liking the tracking stuff so far, if only because I've had trouble with quests in heavily wooded areas where the bandit leader got hurt, panicked, and fled while I was busy with his goons, and then I couldn't find him later. Now I can track the bastard down!

What ways will you be able to disguise your trails? If I anger a town and get everyone after me, I'd like to know I can lay some false trails and sneak off to a nearby cave to wait out the heat..

How long does pursuit last? Will posses follow you into cities/towns/castles/other sites?  It's a fairly standard fantasy trope to follow the guy who murdered your village across the world to exact vengeance, dramatically arriving at the guy's award ceremony to accuse him of his misdeeds. And one of my favorite bits from the Wheel of Time books involved leading a group of enemy orc-equivalents into the Cursed City of Doomy Doom to try and evade them.

[CLA]

So yeah, I read it as "six generic tiles" not "hundreds of unique tiles," with your tracking skill giving you the more detailed information.

It uses six generic tiles (219 to 223 and 254, basically the ballista 'bow' tiles) to make composite images which appear to be 16x16 tiles in dimensions.
These footprints will not be part of the tileset!
They use single tiles already present on the tileset to make 16x16 tile images.

[Cruxador]

I'm gonna disagree with the folks who don't like this. Accurate footprints are something that the userbase can do for Toady.

Also, will footprints respect foot equipment? At least to the extent of checking if there is any or none. Because a boot print would make more sense than a bare foot print for most humans.

[thvaz]

These footprints are a classic example of feature creep. Well, if DF was a tv series, I would say it "jumped the shark" with these footprints.

The suggestion of the character knowing a number of animal tracks and identifying them based on their skill level would be much more appropriate with the previous design of Dwarf Fortress.

[BradUffner]

If the footprints are broken down in to composite pieces people wouldn't have to create specific ones for each creature, or even use generic footprints.  It could be broken down in to data such as foot length, foot width, number of toes, sole type (foot, cloven hoof, bird foot, etc) in the raws and dynamically drawn.  This would also allow cool things like (I asked about this earlier) missing toes that match up to the wounds on the creature.  As a programmer I don't even want to think about all the complications this has (someone mods racoons to have 30 toes / foot), but if toady can manage to pull it off it will be awesome.

[FearfulJesuit]

Toady's going to need to make a bigger default tileset sooner or later. The problem, of course, is that under the current system each tile only needs to call up one byte for shape and, what, four bits for color?

Does anybody have any idea how much, if at all, FPS would be affected if the default tileset were 32x32 (thus, four times larger than currently) instead of 16x16?

[BradUffner]

Toady's going to need to make a bigger default tileset sooner or later. The problem, of course, is that under the current system each tile only needs to call up one byte for shape and, what, four bits for color?

Does anybody have any idea how much, if at all, FPS would be affected if the default tileset were 32x32 (thus, four times larger than currently) instead of 16x16?

The big problem with expanding the tile let is that it's designed around ASCII, which only only has 256 values.  This is what allows it to run without graphics on text-only displays (think dfterm).  Adding more tiles breaks the ASCII and would change a LOT of things.  I immagine there is an aweful lot of code where things are defined as char type that would have to be changed to ints.  Code could rely on some of the special things you can do with chars.  I have to imagine that it would be a huge amount of work to change something so fundamental.  It also has a lot of potential to reintroduce bugs all over the codebase.  I agree that it would probably be the single best thing feature in recent memory, but the programmer in me cringes at the thought if doing it.

[Footkerchief]

in classic rpgs, wich include roguelikes, there's a clear separation in what the player knows from what the character knows, what a player can do and what a character can do. with the latest additions, more hands on aproach to sneaking and tracking, this separation is getting blurred in a way i feel uncomfortable with. now a player has to be himself skilled in sneaking, meaning a supposedly legendary ambusher may behave like an amateur if he is controlled by a player who doesn't yet dominate the mechanics of sneaking, the opposite is true for a dabbling ambusher in the hands of a player that knows the system very well. this makes the character's stats less meaningful, which itself might not be a bad thing(i'm actually quite excited with the sneaking system, and looking forward to play arround with it), but is not coherent with the way rest of the game treats skills.

Yeah.  Graphical footprints are an interesting idea, but I'm not feeling it.  Maybe I'm unimaginitive, but I can only think of one purpose for this feature: establishing tension/suspense while tracking an unknown creature, a la countless horror movies etc.  Textual description could establish tension too, and without the player/character confusion that Askot mentioned.

Also, it just seems perverse that, of all things, footprints could be the first use of ASCII art (as opposed to procedural portraits etc).

[thvaz]

I think I overreacted a bit, but I still don't think it is a good idea. There are too many varieties. A reptile for example would left tracks of their belly and tail besides their footprints.  Different kind of snakes have different moving patterns, affecting their tracks. Supernatural creatures could give false tracks, as this folcloric brazilian creature:

His name comes from the Tupi language kuru'pir, meaning "covered in blisters". According to the cultural legends, this creature has bright red/orange hair, and resembles a man or a dwarf, but its feet are turned backwards. Curupira lives in the forests of Brazil and uses its backward feet to create footprints that lead to its starting point, thus making hunters and travelers confused. Besides that, he can also create illusions and produce a sound that's like a high pitched whistle, in order to scare and drive its victim to madness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curupira

And there is the fact of boots, missing limbs, people deliberately avoiding pursuers... I hope Toady is right about this feature (and that it don't take too many days from the development)

[Cruxador]

Toady's going to need to make a bigger default tileset sooner or later. The problem, of course, is that under the current system each tile only needs to call up one byte for shape and, what, four bits for color?

Does anybody have any idea how much, if at all, FPS would be affected if the default tileset were 32x32 (thus, four times larger than currently) instead of 16x16?

Expanding the default tileset would be a stopgap, and not worth the effort. If Toady is going to rewrite things there, he should make a dynamic system like with creature graphics. I agree that this should be sooner rather than later, though. The current system is becoming increasingly inconvenient, especially for tileset creators and users.

FPS impact would probably be negligible or nonexistant on most systems, since Baughn made graphical rendering multithreaded.

[FearfulJesuit]

1. Wait, graphics are multithreaded now?

2. As much as I sympathise with those who aren't very fond of the tracking changes as a feature creep problem, the fact remains that they're a highly realistic addition to Adventure Mode which are required- or something very much like them is required- if Toady wants to implement running away and wild goose-chases across the map which, after all, are half the fun of adventuring. Armies, bandits and caravans will, after all, spend a good bit, if not most, of their time chasing each other around, and you can't really have that as an expanded and interesting system without a tracking framework. We shouldn't worry that Toady's implementing tracking, only that he be careful how he's going about it.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

nobody is against the implementation of a tracking system, the main point of contention is *graphic* footprints, not the tracking system itself

[Putnam]

1. Wait, graphics are multithreaded now?

Yeah, for a while.

Also...

(those are larger images built from 219-223+254 that'll pop up with a description if we stick with that, not new tiles)

So how are these designed in-file, then? Will modders have to create footprints for their creatures manually?