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[MrWiggles]

ASCII all the way. Never played with a graphic tileset, and I dont really see the point of it.

Syre, there are multiple animals that use the same letter, but at least in Fortress mode, that doesn't matter too greatly. Your Fort Site is going to have a limited number of animals in it,  and even if you do get animals with the same letters, I never found it that confusing.

I can see in Adventure Mode where that'd be more difficult, as since you're shifting biomes more frequently you're going to be encountering more animals.

[drvoke]

No, I use ASCII.  Current tileset/truetype implementation leaves much to be desired.  I dislike the visual clutter that occurs when you have features on the embark map whose characters have been cannibalized for some bit of graphics in a graphical tileset.  Or, when playing without truetype, the stuff that happens to words, arrows, parentheses, etc...

That being said, I absolutely will not play with the default font.  I use a square font/tileset with no graphical flourishes.  The default 16x9 (right?) font tends to make my head ache when trying to designate rooms to be mined out, etc...

[Alkhemia]

I use ASCII but I started with Ironhand but Kokaku right with all the new Animals and Animal-People he going to run out of letters soon, I wonder what he going to do then?

[Chagen46]

ASCII is much more efficient for interpreting tiles. Graphical tilesets are for nonserious roguelike players, which is fine, especially for a nonserious sandboxy game like DF.

Actually, false.

I played with ASCII up until there started to be so many more animals.  Now, you have a single letter, such as "s" representing dozens of completely different kinds of creatures, from satyrs to sharks to snakes to skunks, that having a picture is actually much more efficient at simply determining what a creature is.

You can tell not just what general "class" of job a creature has, but you can immediately identify specific jobs, as well, since your beekeepers will actually be in beekeeper outfits, rather than simply being a brown generic farmer-type unit.

Furthermore, you should check out what Stonesense has been experimenting with lately - they base their graphics off of memory-hacking and have a fully custom way of displaying information, so they are capable of now doing things like displaying what a dwarf is actually wearing with different .pngs, as well as coloring them based upon what dyes the clothing has. 

Hypothetically, they will also be able to display what tasks a dwarf is accomplishing or what dwarf status is through the same instant-recognition icons that ASCII is simply incapable of displaying. 

ASCII is a barrier to the amount of information that can be conveyed to the player in a single screen's worth of information, as there are only 256 possible uses of any given tile, and there are already fairly limited numbers of tiles on the screen already.

Not exactly. DF isn't even in ASCII, it's in Faux-ASCII rendered in OpenGL. There's a LOT more glyphs available with that. For example:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

This is the IPA, used by linguists to easily transcribe recordings and the various sound systems of languages with almost zero ambiguity. Just look at the consonant and vowel charts. There's at least 20 more tiles for Toady to use.

[NW_Kohaku]

This is a nice idea in theory but it's still very difficult for me to discern the details on a sprite. Also, while there's a number of possible interpretations of a single character on screen, context often limits it to very few in actuality..

Besides all that I think it's a waste to use more than 16^2 pixels per tile. I like seeing more of my embark at once.

I don't use any of the major tilesets out-of-the-box, I cut-and-paste parts I like, and have made some of my own tiles to suit my needs.  Likewise, I use 16x16 tiles, myself, but that's because my old monitor only goes up to 1280x960 resolution, anyway. 

I also have been experimenting with different kinds of graphics - one doesn't need to have the as-photorealistic-as-possible graphics.  One thing I've been trying are color-coded "badges" that display job data as color-coded bars on a circle.  You just have to learn what each color combination means, and you're capable of learning much more information from a symbol than a single letter tells you, and it is more visually distinct than an image.

Graphics don't have to be anything more complex than the pseudo-ASCII tileset in order to convey information.  It is wrong to assume that all graphics sets have to be Ironhand.

[NW_Kohaku]

Not exactly. DF isn't even in ASCII, it's in Faux-ASCII rendered in OpenGL. There's a LOT more glyphs available with that. For example:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

This is the IPA, used by linguists to easily transcribe recordings and the various sound systems of languages with almost zero ambiguity. Just look at the consonant and vowel charts. There's at least 20 more tiles for Toady to use.

Theoretically, Toady could just change the way that tiles are handled, and make a tileset that extends nigh-infinitely.  The "ASCII" tileset is just a simple thing Toady turned into an image that the game could chop up and apply as tiles.  If he wanted, he could make a tileset with the space for millions of tiles. 

What Japa and Caldfir are doing over in Stonesense is using multiple layers of .png files on top of one another in conjunction with special "hat" or "shoes" or "beard" tiles that get pasted on top of a basic dwarf image so as to create tremendous numbers of permutations of a single basic dwarf image wearing all forms of clothes and having all manner of hair styles and possibly having all manner of objects carried in the hand. 

This takes some work to actually set up and do, especially in all the pixel art that needs drawing, but it's hardly the most advanced thing in the world to program, especially since all the data for the hats actually being present in the game are already coded, it's just the tiny step of actually showing it to the player.

[Malarauko]

I got used to ASCII. I love the vanilla dwarf fortress. I like the intro, the music and the graphics. I actively like playing ASCII games now and when you go from DF to, say, Skyrim the difference is amazing. It makes other games look better in comparison and still looks good itself.

To address NW's point although its great that StoneSense can do that its besides the point. It not what DF has ever been about. Its never been about making the experience simpler. Maybe more refined but never graphically. I'd argue that DFs current graphics are as important a feature as anything else you can think of.

[NW_Kohaku]

To address NW's point although its great that StoneSense can do that its besides the point. It not what DF has ever been about. Its never been about making the experience simpler. Maybe more refined but never graphically. I'd argue that DFs current graphics are as important a feature as anything else you can think of.

It's not about "simpler", however, it's about "more informative". 

If you are not constrained by just 256 characters, you can transmit more data in the same symbols in the same tile than you could with just 256 characters. 

DF is a game that is all about generating tremendous amounts of data about creatures or objects or history, but then making the interface to actually see those things annoyingly obtuse to the point where most players don't even bother looking. 

Put that information front-and-center on the screen, however, and you transmit more of the detail this game has into the consciousness of the player as they make their decisions. 

That's worlds different from "looking pretty".

[davros]

I like ASCII games.
It's like reading the matrix.
Soapmaker, strand extractor, metalsmith, axedwarf.

[Malarauko]

To address NW's point although its great that StoneSense can do that its besides the point. It not what DF has ever been about. Its never been about making the experience simpler. Maybe more refined but never graphically. I'd argue that DFs current graphics are as important a feature as anything else you can think of.

It's not about "simpler", however, it's about "more informative". 

If you are not constrained by just 256 characters, you can transmit more data in the same symbols in the same tile than you could with just 256 characters. 

DF is a game that is all about generating tremendous amounts of data about creatures or objects or history, but then making the interface to actually see those things annoyingly obtuse to the point where most players don't even bother looking. 

Put that information front-and-center on the screen, however, and you transmit more of the detail this game has into the consciousness of the player as they make their decisions. 

That's worlds different from "looking pretty".

All the information is there you're just asking for it to be easier for you to find. Once you start down that road its a slippery slope.

[Flying Dice]

Used a tileset for one fortress, and never again. Most tilesets are nauseating, and ASCII is like a cuddly cutebold. :3

[Exlo]

 I can't see why some people don't like graphics, and others don't like ASCII. They're both fine, just play the game.

[cameron]

To address NW's point although its great that StoneSense can do that its besides the point. It not what DF has ever been about. Its never been about making the experience simpler. Maybe more refined but never graphically. I'd argue that DFs current graphics are as important a feature as anything else you can think of.

It's not about "simpler", however, it's about "more informative". 

If you are not constrained by just 256 characters, you can transmit more data in the same symbols in the same tile than you could with just 256 characters. 

DF is a game that is all about generating tremendous amounts of data about creatures or objects or history, but then making the interface to actually see those things annoyingly obtuse to the point where most players don't even bother looking. 

Put that information front-and-center on the screen, however, and you transmit more of the detail this game has into the consciousness of the player as they make their decisions. 

That's worlds different from "looking pretty".

All the information is there you're just asking for it to be easier for you to find. Once you start down that road its a slippery slope.

Slippery slope to what, having all the information being easy to find?

[Stoup]

I used tilesets to get myself acclimated to the game, but once the tileset I used starting using ASCII characters as a placeholder for a few animals it bugged the hell out of me. I wanted it one way or the other, so now I've gone and grown to love the default graphics.

[NW_Kohaku]

All the information is there you're just asking for it to be easier for you to find. Once you start down that road its a slippery slope.

A slippery slope to what?  A game with a better interface?

How easy it is to find information makes a huge difference when you are playing a game.  How much do you know about any random dwarf in your fort?  Do you even see them as distinguishable at all? 

How do you know when a dwarf is injured, or when a dwarf is unhappy, but not unhappy enough to actually cause a tantrum or the down arrow indicator to pop up on the screen as, again, a visual indicator of information on the play area window? 

Unless you are religiously tracking all the detailed views of your dwarves on a game-daily basis, or are using Dwarf Therapist to give you more information more easily, then you aren't getting that information at all.  And most people just skip that part if they aren't using Dwarf Therapist.

The same goes for injuries - you basically can't tell a dwarf is injured if there isn't a mortal wound indicator or a blood trail or you are looking at their information page for some reason.  Without that reason to look, why would you ever notice that injury?  Unless there is somehow an indicator that attracts player attention to the fact that there is a problem, why would a player ever go looking for information they may need?

There were plenty of problems with a "bug" in DF where people had doctors that refused to treat patients, and nobody understood why.  The reason why was because the doctors had a personality trait that made them not want to help others, so they refused to do it, but that information was never conveyed to the players, so they never figured it out, and just figured the game must be buggy. 

Mechanics in a game are useless unless the game somehow can transmit the effect they are having in the game as information to the player.  If the interface is so convoluted that players don't even know where to look for the information on their problem, or that they don't even realize there is a problem at all because that information was never transmitted to them, then it is the failure of the game, not the player.