Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

I consider it an essential part of Dwaf Fortress, and can't play without it.

119 (18.4%)

I use it for pretty screenshots, but otherwise don't use it during play.

211 (32.7%)

I only try it occasionally.

174 (27%)

I have no idea why I'm even in this thread, I don't use it.

141 (21.9%)

Total Members Voted: 642

[Rose]

One other thing about snow is that anything can have a snow-covered sprite if somebody draws one. Just nothing uses them yet.

The thing about being partially covered by sprites though is that it's actually two different sprites entirely, and would need an annoying amount of work to set up.

And I've caught the lazy.

[therahedwig]

Can you be bothered to look into this at the least:

I'm usig dfhack-stonesense for 34.07 to test stuff in.
At start-up: 550 mb of ram being used.
Open Stonesense once: 737 mb
Close stonesense accidentally because I was trying to move the window(I also have the 'stonesense won't properly appear on screen' bug)
Open Stonesense the second time: over a 1000 mb, and everything's slow as molasses..
Close stonesense the second time: 868mb in use.
Open stonesense third time: 1.153 mb, still slow as molasses.
close stonesense third time: 1.009mb in use.

I know from previous tries that the first time everything's as smooth as it should be, but afterwards things slow down incredibly.
I mostly find these things because I'm too lazy to edit the init to set it to debug. >_>

Now a bit more of a general question:

Blending modes test.
The lowest row is greyscale pictures.
The middle row is greyscale pictures in multiply blending mode against a red background. This is how stonesense currently recolours stuff.
The third row is greyscale pictures in multiply blending against a red background. And then on top there's another layer of greyscale pictures with a addition blending mode overlaid on the first set.

As you can see, the last row does include highlights, but due to the way blending works it mixed the white and black and red into a greish pink.
there's a third option, but that requires a seperate sprite for all the highlights and all the shadows. It doesn't need blending modes from what I can tell though.
Actually, regarding that last one: Japa, is it possible to set sub-material colours? So that you could say 'material clay has this colour, and this colour of the highlights and this colour of the shadows'?
So: Color="material" and Colour="material_shadow" Colour="material_highlights"?
Because then we shouldn't strictly need to make all stonesets unique due to colour-restrainst.

We could use blending modes to colour the highlight-layer with "material_highlights" and the shadow layer with "material_shadow", then we use them as subsprites on a material colour main sprite.
The spritesheet would look something like this though:

[Rose]

right now you can color a base sprite, and then leave a subsprite uncolored, or colored according to something else entirely, but there's no material hi-lite color, per se.

Separate layer hilights is the reccommended method, and is what I use, when I use it.

blood, for example, uses it.

[therahedwig]

I see.

And about the memory leak? Or is that old hat?

Spoiler: more about stones, not memory leak related (click to show/hide)

attempt at making a lime-stonesque sprite. Made the other sprites boulder-walls. Don't know how to feel about it, critique please?
EDIT: meanwhile, adding highlights as a seperate subsprite works pretty well:

Only big problem is that the current bouldery stone makes stuff look like gravel.

Solifuge, I currently set up a seperate folder called 'stonesense HD', in which I have a folder called 'terrain' I also deactivate the old terrain. I figured we might want to start with a 'clean' slate for organisational purposes.(We can still get all those pesky values from the existing xml files)
Once I've got myself some filesharing stuff free I'll sent you the folder

[Jeoshua]

I think the vertical tiling you have on that looks great.  Also I wouldn't worry about the stone floors looking like gravel, since the biome where they would appear without other ground cover would likely be Rock Desert anyways or tunnel diggings... so it fits.

[Solifuge]

Snazzy grass! I'm a bit torn on the limestone, though. One of my favorite geological formations is when Limestone forms pronounced horizontal layers, and that appearance also does double duty for layered flaky sediment like shale. However, this current configuration evokes stalactites/stalagmites, is closer to what water-eroded limestone deposits in caves look like, and does double duty for foliate igneous rocks like Basalt. It's a tough call... my personal bias would say that this sprite would make a thematic jagged igneous rock, while something else with flat layering would make a stronger limestone/sediment. Ultimately it depends on what the other rocks look like, though.

That aside, I think the tops could use a bit more texture or contrast... as it sits, it's hard to tell them apart unless walls are visible. From a simulation perspective that's good; a lot of stone looks the same until it's cut into or exposed in an outcropping. Taking a more game-oriented perspective, though, recognizing the different stone types from any side can be important. Also, don't be afraid to make some of the stones have broad flat surfaces, or give one of the random tiles an exaggerated version of its primary feature (a pronounced crack, large outcrop, etc). Making them distinct enough from each other to break up the repetition and is ideal; too much similarity, and they still blur together. Again, it's another stylistic call.

As for the color-related woes, we could probably just hue-shift the materials individually. SAI has a nice simple function for hue shifting, which ought to preserve the warm/cool shift between light and shadows. It's not the most flexible, and might cause artifacts, but I imagine it working well enough.

One thing I'd mention is that floors appear vertically between these tiles, so you might want to take that into account when making them tile. Also, the floors are more often going to be seen on top of walls... wall-tops might as well be black squares for cutaway purposes. There's also the whole filler floor concept (which blends two walls vertically) vs. the regular floor (which appears on the top, and actually contains the topside texture) too.

Spoiler: A treatise on Filler Floors (click to show/hide)

It's as good a time as any to bring this out again:

Excellent. I'd reccomend Dropbox, which I can invite you to. Great for up to several Gigs of public storage.

[therahedwig]

Well, the problem is not so much recolouring, as for that matter we could just use gradient mapping.

Rather I was trying to look for a way to make default stone look a little better. also, we have to be careful with the amount of memory our HD content takes up. In that regard, it's better to recolour, as you're reusing the same sprite several times.
On top of that, it would make modding in 'modded' materials a bunch easier to do as well(just select the sprite, make sure you've got material colours set, maybe recolour the highlights... and it fits)

Alright, I'll try and make something more limestoney. Really, what I'm looking for is something that can serve as default rock, and limestone seemed okay.

[Dervish]

I like the new grass too Thera, and is that moss there? Very nice. I like the visual depiction of limestone, when I think of limestone, I think of limestone formations, so that works for me. You're damn close to making it vertically tiling, finish it up, even if it's used for something else.

I've been lurking in this thread a while, but I'd like to help out with this project, in any way I can. I can do line art, and tile art, and can follow direction.

Here's a cabinet I put together tonight in 3ds max:


That's just a rough, I haven't post processed the render yet to give it edging, but I can render all angles, change lighting, and use any base texture. I intend to do a wood/metal frame model that's more angled, and a kind of knobby stone model. I'm willing to do that for all furniture models, and I'm willing to do line art or tile art for a lot of the items too. I have no xml skills though, so I'd only be able to supply graphics.

[Caldfir]

The memory leak is a known thing.  Remnants of the DFHack merger I think, since this sort of thing wouldn't be an issue with a standalone program. 

Have some free time today so I am doing some testing to see if I can narrow down the cause. 

Terrain is looking great.  I think the outlined creature sprites I've drawn will work well alongside it.  A big complaint about the old grass setup was that the creatures got lost in the terrain, but if the terrain is using a smooth art style and the creatures are all outlined in black, I think that will solve the problem (hope so anyway). 

edit:  Alright, well there's probably a few things leaking (putting stonesense inside dfhack inside df seems to have been a traumatic event), but the worst of the recurring issues seems to be related to bitmap loading.  If you switch to OPENGL rendering from ANY in the init file, this should be reduced signficantly.  On windows machines it seems that DirectX is favored, and it is behaving really strangely (seems to be creating a software copy of every single image, and never releasing that copy).  OpenGL is still leaking a bit, and software rendering leaks the least, but you will need to restart your stonesense like 200 times to run into the same problems you get in 3 restarts using DirectX. 

[therahedwig]

Your near daily picture of prettyness:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Looking at the picture Solifuge posted I'm afraid I sorta misinterpreted the stucture. I guess this could also be used for stonewalls if it doesn't find use as natural rock?
The vertical tiling is pretty good, but that's hardly difficult with a stone that's made up from horizontal layers :|

@Caldfir: Ah, that's great. I do notice that openGL rendering botches up the text display though(making debug mode a bit useless). PM me your e-mail adress, then I'll share the stonesense HD folder with you as well.

@Dervish. That's great. Why don't you take one of the screens posted and place your graphic in it. As a mock-up. That way we can see if there's need for things like outlines or whatever. Experiment a bit

[Vherid]

These more graphical tiles are looking very lovely, I just hope that if they eventually make it into stonesense, that it is optional, as I would certainly prefer the heavily pixelated final fantasy tactics/tactics ogre esque tiles.

[Siquo]

All tilesets are optional. Just like with DF tiles, you can easily switch in/out entire sets or even mix&match to make your own (although the latter might require extensive xml work).

[therahedwig]

1) Pixelart version will have to be supported if only because there's people with less capable computers out there.
2) We're aiming to structure the xml files for the HD version as such that not only will they be easy to toggle in their entirety, but tileset groups within it will also be easy to toggle on and off. So if you only wanted HD grass for example, this would only require going into the HD map, open the index.txt and comment out all the non-grass references.

Personally, if we manage to fix up the HD sufficiently, I would like to go back and edit the original terrain similarly, so that it's easy to mod too.

3) I suggest we'd make how to do this a FAQ section, if only to inform people that it's possible.

Right now, the new grass and the new water are both optional, and I don't think people know that.

[Rose]

actually, I don't think people know that there's new water in the first place.

[therahedwig]

Uhm, is the 'stonesense doesn't register the proper terrain' bug also known?

Because I've embarked on a Black sand desert with Dolomite, Silty-clay-loam and clay. According to stonesense however I embarked on a Calcareous Ooze desert with Limestone, Siliceous ooze and Pelagic clay...

still using 31.07.

I also noticed something similar with the previous embark map, where all soil was white-sand, even though it was supossed to be silty-loam.