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[jecowa]

I think PE's pack-builder script requires releases.

[PeridexisErrant]

Yep, I require releases because repos are often not in a releasable state.

[jecowa]

Yep, I require releases because repos are often not in a releasable state.

Once DFHack v0.43.05 comes out, I'll do releases on everything except CLA, Taffer, and Rally Ho!. (I'm guessing those three would prefer to do it themselves.) I would do them all now, but it's kind of tedious to retag things.

[CLA]

Yep, I require releases because repos are often not in a releasable state.

I should have figured that out on my own. I'll get to it tomorrow then. Done. Release for 43.05 is on github.

Once DFHack v0.43.05 comes out, I'll do releases on everything except CLA, Taffer, and Rally Ho!. (I'm guessing those three would prefer to do it themselves.) I would do them all now, but it's kind of tedious to retag things.

I generally wouldn't mind someone doing a release for the sole purpose of updating a starter pack or something similar. That's a big part of why I moved CLA to github (with the organizational structure as it is) in the first place - If I vanish from the earth somehow, people still can easily do releases.
So if anyone feels like I'm not active enough compared to changes in DF, starter pack releases, etc, they're absolutely welcome to do a release, keep the pack maintained, and so on.
I guess fundamental changes are another matter, but there's always pull requests and forks for those.

[feelotraveller]

This is a bit of an odd comment/request but would it be possible to add a distinctive colour to the human settlement tile in world generation?  (Like maybe... red?) 

I'm using the Myne set and have just spent more than a few hours playing with advanced world generation.  One of the things that I look for in an embark is the geographical relation to other settlements/races.  (Rather than just wanting to know if they are accessible I like to konw if they will be closer to the Goblins than the location of a potential embark.)  Goblins are normally pretty pink and are usually dead easy to find on the region map and if not it is only a matter of picking them out of the evil background, similarly for Elves and yellow.  Dwarves can be found easily by chosing the various civilsations to embark from.  But the Humans tend to blend into the background, sometimes green, or blue, or brown, or light blue, whatever the underlying tile colour is.  I really don't know what I'm looking for colour wise and although their symbol is distinctive it does not really stand out. 

I repeatedly wasted minutes looking for them and in one instance only discovered the second (of expected 2) civilsations by chance; by investigating a neighbouring tile for embark possibilities.  I had decided that they had probably been wiped out by a megabeast, or whatever, during worldgen after having searched unsuccessfully for them for maybe fifteen minutes.  Salt in the wound was that I then spent a couple of hours checking out various embark possibilities before stumbling across them.

Anyway, don't know if it is even possible.  But at least I have vented. 

[CLA]

I can't change the color of the human settlements on the map: I'm fairly sure it's hardcoded, but even if it wasn't I wouldn't be willing to maintain yet another raw change.
The underlying problem is more likely the color scheme.

I have had a section in my notes since forever, reminding me to recheck and improve the color scheme because tiles are hard to see with some background/foreground color combinations.
Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to it yet, and I have no idea when I will.
Fortunately, there are a couple of really amazing color schemes, and this seems like a good opportunity to try them out. Vherid has some wonderful ones, and the one that Taffer uses by default is great too. Check them out on the wiki.
Report back if it works better with another color scheme, if you can!

[feelotraveller]

Hm.  I'm happy to have a play with colour schemes (looking at them now) but I'm not sure how it might help in this instance.  (Off topic: I vaguely remember in the past trying out an alternative colour scheme that you used to include.  Which one was that?)

As far as I can tell/remember (seat of the pants that is) the settlement tiles on the region map take their colour from the underlying tile.  For example, on occasion (at least in the past - haven't confirmed it in recent experience) Goblin settlements were sometimes grey, if they occurred on a grey tile.  However nearly always they are placed on default evil terrain, that has a distinctive colour.  Similarly for Elves.  But Humans will settle on a variety of coloured tiles (rivers=blue, major river intersections=cyan, some other river variation=white(pretty sure) badlands=brown, forests=green(or maybe that was grassland? but whatever) and so on.  Changing the colour scheme might change the greens, blues, browns, etc. but I doubt it will it add notability to (the colour of) the Human settlement tile.

Perhaps it's not possible to override the default adoption of the underlying tile colour (or not worth the effort), and that's okay, but it would have been great if it was. 

[jecowa]

I don't know why humans are green and blue on the embark map. According to their raws, it looks like they should be white. – [FRIENDLY_COLOR:7:0:1]

Also, they use lots of tiles to represent their settlements. Many of their tiles are used by text, and so can't be edited without making text look weird. And I don't know that it's possible to assign different tiles to be used for their settlements.

For doing a lot of map stuff, the best option for now might be to use a specially-made tilesheet just for map viewing, then switch back to a normal tileset when back to playing.

I don't think editing color schemes will help when humans and plains are using the same color.

[feelotraveller]

I think I had it wrong about Goblin and Elven settlements on the region map.  It appears their colours are now fixed and (probably) not tile dependent, definitely true in the limited cases I checked.  Not sure why this is not the case for Humans.  If they were a predictable colour (bright white would be fine if that's the default) they would be much easier to find.

In reply to jecowa: in the Myne set human settlements use the ash grapheme (it's like a joined a and e) on the region screen, both uppercase and lowercase.  That is the only symbol I have seen for them for some time.  (On the local screen they use # and are white, but that is by the by.)  I've just been doing short worldgen's with no oceans so it's possible that other symbols might get used in different circumstances...

After sifting through all the colour schemes I could find, and quickly testing at worldgen level, I've got to say that I'm pretty happy with scheme that the set uses.  Is it a CLA special?  Anyway it's good.  I am used to it though.  The three colour schemes I kept for future experimentation were Another Natural Colour Scheme (far less bright, but that can be a good thing), AngleWyrm's Colourset (needs the greens to be more distinct) and Dawnbringer by Taffer (I'm a bit bothered by the off-black).  There were a few which made my head hurt, and another half a dozen I noted down for an honourable mention.  And several which were good but had a shockingly bad bit (bright orange for brown sticks in mind) which made them unusable for me.

I guess part of the trick is being able to balance all uses of the colours, all tiles which call them and all the circumstances in which they get highlighted or backgrounded or whatever (with just 16 colours, right?).  If you have particular tile colour conflicts in mind and want someone to have a look just say the word.  Totally understand if its going to take more time than it's worth to get me up to speed though.  Unfortunately anything I notice is going to be with the Myne set but I could note any difficulties I come across if you want that.

The human settlements thing is really minor since usually we spend little time at the worldgen level, and only infrequently.  It is possible that maybe once or twice again in forever I might spend a bunch of time refining a custom worldgen but then again I might not.  Just thought it was worth mentioning as I was passing through.

[CLA]

Perhaps it's not possible to override the default adoption of the underlying tile colour

It's not - that's why I suggested changing the color scheme.

Is it a CLA special?

I made it, yeah.

Just thought it was worth mentioning as I was passing through.

I appreciate it. Thank you.

[Taffer]

The three colour schemes I kept for future experimentation were Another Natural Colour Scheme (far less bright, but that can be a good thing), AngleWyrm's Colourset (needs the greens to be more distinct) and Dawnbringer by Taffer (I'm a bit bothered by the off-black).  There were a few which made my head hurt, and another half a dozen I noted down for an honourable mention.  And several which were good but had a shockingly bad bit (bright orange for brown sticks in mind) which made them unusable for me.

Thank you for the thumbs up for Dawnbringer, although I only assembled two of DawnBringer's palettes. I've darkened black in three colour schemes for you--Pastel, Taffer, and Dawnbringer--but not to pure black. It'll be in my next release. If you have any other criticisms about any colour schemes that I distribute please consider sharing. I've removed RawberryCough's Rawberry scheme from my next release under the assumption that it's the "bright orange for brown" that you mentioned.

I don't want to hijack CLA's thread any further though, so please respond in my thread if it's about a colour scheme included in my set. Thank you for posting your thoughts!

[Mohreb el Yasim]

Hi Cla, 
I was wondering, do you work or have considered working with vector graphics for your set (so that any size versions can be generated easily)?
Mohreb

[CLA]

Hi Cla, 
I was wondering, do you work or have considered working with vector graphics for your set (so that any size versions can be generated easily)?
Mohreb

Hello Mohreb.

I think it's too much work to get right perfect. Looking at the various tiles, it seems definitely doable to vectorize the base tileset*, with a reasonable amount of work (in fact, I think doing it manually would give you practically perfect results). But getting all the creature shapes look right would be very tedious and I can't put in that much work into DF right now (I'm already happy that I find the time to check the forum and react to DF releases).
Of course you (and anyone else) are welcome to try your hand at this, and share the results here. You could try asking Max^TM, he seems to get good results.

That said, I think the most effective way to get a perfect result would be to:
1) scale image up to a large size (say 2000x2000) with Nearest Neighbor, i.e. preserving distinct pixels
2) use Illustrators "Live Trace" to trace all shapes, as accurate as possible, i.e. again preserving all hard edges
3) manually replace all the 45° diagonals with new diagonals that are actual diagonals, not pixel staircases
4) manually draw round corners where there should be round corners, not pixel staircases.

That way you get all the straight lines perfect, and just have to do the (comparably few) diagonals and round corners manually.
Also, you wouldn't have to do step 2) at all and could instead just keep working with a bitmap image. if you feel more comfortable with bitmap drawing. At that size, there's no practical difference to a vector image for our purposes.


* (It's enlarged from the square version of the default tileset, I believe Haowan was the one that originally did that)

[Max™]

Oh good lord no, I was able to clean up the GIMP rescale algorithm decently but vectors are a whole other ballgame and dePlatino is the man there.

[CLA]

Ah, shit sorry. Yeah of course, dePlatino!