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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

[Solifuge]

Hey, I still exist.

I've had some real life trouble, and mainly returned to see what's up with forum after the big hauling update.

I didn't get much further on grim-dark. There's some metamorphics done, but I never could get those ramps to be finished.(Too much damn work).
So, anyway, because you guys are looking into hi-res stuff I guess I should stop pixeling and open up a hi-res program.

If there's anything I can help with, what would it be? I'd prefer it be terrain stuffs as caldfir's style and mine are quite different.
I could do some new grass, but I could also kick out some basic bricks for the basic stonetypes(though no ramps. ramps are hell).

We could finally get that grass to look less obnoxious without losing charm.

Hey, it's good to see you again! I really liked your work with Grimdark, so hearing that you might be interested in tackling HD terrain is great. I've not got much experience in High-Res work myself, but if you'd like to present a basic style that we can start from, I can probably tackle ramps and such. I do have a decent chunk of concept art put together, but it's far from comprehensive yet. Anyway, here are a few of my half-baked plans for HD Stonesense Tilework, for your consideration:

Spoiler: 64x64px. Resolution, with Revised Tile Geometry (click to show/hide)

Inspiration: Yar's 64x64 Outside Tileset

64px seems to make for a good native size on non-HD monitors, and is about as zoomed in as I'd ever want to be while still making sense of the terrain. 128px might make for a nice focused screenshot once in a while, but isn't very useful beyond that. 256px is just silly.

As for the geometry of ramps and tiles, I'd like terrain to use more variable shapes, rather than the flat cubes and angular ramps of yore. The terrain can end up looking really pleasant and natural with some irregularities and curves thrown in, and tiles much less noticeably. Non-cubic tiles also help convey a sense of texture to terrain, and creates some nice effects (blades of grass in front of a wall help give both the wall and grass some depth). Constructed ramps being angular (maybe with a chip or two in their silhouettes, depending on the material) is only sensible. Note, this might require a tweak that allows tiles to be slightly oversized beyond their native resolution (give or take 8 pixels), making the tiles something like  72 pixels each... though the irregularities can still be done in their native resolution by trimming them in a bit, and crafty use of layering.

Spoiler: Random Tiles, Revised Lighting, and a 16-Color Index per Tile (click to show/hide)

Inspiration: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Grimoire of the Rift

I'm rather fond of the stylistic elements of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2's terrain, and put together a gallery of some of their mapping tiles to reference. I like that they use about 4 individual tiles to represent each terrain type, and randomize between them, so the map looks more natural. The transitional floor tiles (the smooth grass/sand-to-dirt transitions in the gallery) are really classy, but border on lots of work, unless limited to a few common tile types (grass/sand/dirt, for instance). Also, though recoloring monochrome tiles is a nice space-saver, it tends to flatten terrain colors (especially shadows), and doesn't allow for tiles (say, barrels or trees) with 2 or more primary colors. I'd suggest a move toward fully colored terrain sprites, and falling back on recoloring a monochrome sprite only when Stonesense lacks a specific sprite for a given material entry (say, for a modded-in stone type).

[Caldfir]

ooo - the possibility of some hi-res terrain

The FFT-style is nice, but remember there's the added wrinkle of stuff still looking good at a variety of zoom levels.  GrimDark was always an amazing set of tiles - really liked the look.  Ramps are a pain in the ass though.  I can see it being worthwhile to have a different ramp set for each of the classes of stone (ores/metamorphic/igneous/sedimentary), but even that's a lot of work.  Anyway.  Excited.

I'm thinking in the future I might switch to 128x128 tiles, since that seems to be the highest zoom anyone actually uses anyway.  It seems like plenty of people have trouble loading the big texture files as well, so that would be a plus.  If I draw things all pixelated, then you don't really lose information on that first scale down anyway.  I've been a bit slow with drawing of late - got some chickens and ducks on the way.  I'm also restructuring the sprite sheets themselves to be a little smarter on how animals get put together.  The old ones had some redundant subsprites and things that really oughtn't be hanging about. 

Regardless, there's lots to look forward to

Spoiler: animals are coming along (click to show/hide)

[orius]

Anyway, here are a few of my half-baked plans for HD Stonesense Tilework, for your consideration:

Spoiler: 64x64px. Resolution, with Revised Tile Geometry (click to show/hide)

Inspiration: Yar's 64x64 Outside Tileset

64px seems to make for a good native size on non-HD monitors, and is about as zoomed in as I'd ever want to be while still making sense of the terrain. 128px might make for a nice focused screenshot once in a while, but isn't very useful beyond that. 256px is just silly.

Oh wow.  I can't wait to see Caldfir's dorfs running around in that terrain.

[therahedwig]

Crude test in tiled:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I create these at 256x256, and scaled them down 50% so the tile is 128x128. This is as to make the end-product a bit smoother. I took half an hour over this.
There's still a lot of work to be done(it tiles badly) but I'm happy with the resizing.
The idea behind this is that it's a visualiser and the tiles should be more icons rather than realistic. This way, if looking at them at low-res, they'll still look good.

So cartoony painted style.

I have much more thoughts in my mind but they're not coming out nicely because I'm hungry :| I'll get back to you.

EDIT:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This time they're made at 276x276, scaled down to 138x138, with the idea being that there's a 10px margin for irregularity.
I also tested a bit with little cracks on the tile(compare down-right to up-left), it doesn't work too well if you make them too dark. Also, there's the problem of the 'escher-effect'. this was initially solved with a black line that's rendered on top of the wall-tiles, but if we want iregular tiles, we'd need to think of how to deal with that.


An example of easy recolouring without boring colours.
I discovered this technique while pixelarting.
It's like this:
you have the sprite.
You have one version of the sprite that is the main colour. Then you have a version of the sprite that is only the shadows. This one is coloured in the shadow-colour. This one is layered above the main colour with the multiply blending mode. Then there's another version of the sprite that's only the highlights. This one is coloured in the highlights colour, and layered above all others with the 'screen' blending mode.

http://tnypic.net/55a05.png
(middle row is what I'm talking about. The second image and the third are layered with blending modes above the first to make the green stones in the second screenshot)

I'd explain how to substract the 'highlights' layer and 'shadows'layer from a greyscale image, but it's rather hard to explain, because it deals with manipulating the alphachannel.

So I dunno what is possible and what isn't, but these are the few little experiments I did.

EDIT2:


Slightly less obnoxious grass.

EDIT3:
FFA2 does have a certain sense of tile-use but I think afterwards the full maps are refined. It's very hard to mimic this quality with stonesense's engine and purpose.

Battleplan:

-default metal
-default soil
-default gem
-default sedimentary
-default igneous intrusive
-default igneous extrusive
-default metamorphic
-default other-stone
-default wall.
-default grass
-default wood

how many each? 2? 4? (for variation of course)

After that probably do full-colour metals first. Metals are important in dwarf fortress.

I'm inclined to go after grasses afterwards, to make them less obnoxious.
Then I'd go for the stones, but I guess the trees need work too :x I dunno yet.

[Graebeard]

 

This work is really great.  The FFA style is fantastic.  (I recognized the maps before I even read the reference.)  I don't know if it would translate well to Stonesense, but I'd sure love to see it work out.

@ Therahedwig: this looks fantastic.  You may already be planning on addressing this, but the vertical transitions seem a bit too sharp.  The contrast between the shadow on the right-facing walls and the floor tiles beneth them might look more natural if it were scaled back.

[Rose]

Okay, what we can do right now:

• anti-escher borders of any arbitrary shape.
• Multiply blending with the color. (just draw the shadows colored in the shadow color, then the whole tile is multiplied with the material color.
• Tiles larger than the standard tile size. (just cut it up, and offset each one)

what can be done:

• Other blend modes. (not sure about screen, but addition is possible. here is a list of what blending modes we can do without shaders.

The tiles look real good so far.

Grass can also get a different tile for different grass amounts.

[therahedwig]

Okay, what we can do right now:

• anti-escher borders of any arbitrary shape.
• Multiply blending with the color. (just draw the shadows colored in the shadow color, then the whole tile is multiplied with the material color.
• Tiles larger than the standard tile size. (just cut it up, and offset each one)

what can be done:

• Other blend modes. (not sure about screen, but addition is possible. here is a list of what blending modes we can do without shaders.

The tiles look real good so far.

Grass can also get a different tile for different grass amounts.

Right, but the escher-thing of arbitrary shape required a conditional subsprite layered above the main sprite, isn't that so?
And then the image-offsets...

:|

I think I'll be looking more closely into margin-less tiles, because the xml file to process only one tile-type will be complicate. For each tiletype+material type: bug-prone parsing pain. Not to mention there will be huge swats of sprite-sheet being transparent.

I'll have to check about the blending modes. addition isn't quite what I would like. I'm surprised that screen isn't among them. the blending formula is hardly any more complex then multiply's...

I know about the grass. I did the original grass as well, remember?

@greabeard: Yeah, I was wondering about it, but I figured it was an issue that could be fixed later.

[therahedwig]

Yeah, I more or less rescaled the stone back to 32x32, looks just as nice. I guess we can just have gaps in the tiles if we want slightly more iregular tiles.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Solifuge]

Therahedwig, that looks great. Ideally, we could end up with 4 tiles per material block, and 2 for each ramp geometry, to minimize noticeable repetition. Also, if you want to focus on churning out tiles, other people (me, or others) can provide borders for anti-eschering the edges. (speaking of which, I'm considering alpha shadow overlays for edges too. More on this later this week.) Also remember that each tile is essentially made up of a cubic wall block (which can be black inside, for cutaway purposes), and a thin floor block that goes on top.

Anyway, here are some materials to consider. If I missed anything, feel free to add it to the list. I'll do more stone types later.

Tile Materials:
- Grainy Sedimentary (Unprocessed): |Formation 1|Formation 2
- Layered Sedimentary (Unprocessed): |Formation 1|Formation 2
- Sedimentary Wall (Raw): |Mortared Shale|
- Sedimentary Wall (Block): |Dry-Joint Wall|Flagstones|
- Igneous Extrusive (Unprocessed): |Basalt Detail|Formation 1|Formation 2|
- Igneous Intrusive (Unprocessed): |Granite Detail|Formation 1|Formation 2
- Native Metal (Unprocessed): |Rocky Type|Shiny Type| Colorized metal ore veins.

- Metal Bar (Unprocessed): |Hammered Type|Plated Type| Metal plating, hollow or over implied backing material.
- Metal Bar (Block/Smoothed/Engraved): |Smooth Polished|Hammered Pattern| Patterned solid metal blocks.
- Crystal (Unprocessed): |Giant Crystal|Crystal On Stone| Crystal/Gem deposits.
- Crystal (Block/Smooth/Engraved): |Crystal Composite|Smoothed Block| Shaped, cut gemstones crafted into walls.

NAME (): |EX 1|EX 2|
** This took a while to assemble. More Later.

Also, some common tile types:
Main Terrain Tiles: (All Materials)
 -Block
- Floor
- Ramp
General Construction: (Raw Stone/Wood, Metal Bars, Stone/Wood/Glass/Metal Blocks)
- Stair
- Support/Pillar
- Door
- Table
- Chair/Throne
- Statue

[therahedwig]

TBH. I don't think I'll be doing chairs and the like till I find I have nothing better to do.

I'll be focusing on the blocks+floors till then.

Also:
4 x rough
4 x smoothed
4 x bolder wall
4 x block wall
2 x arrow-holes
that makes 18 tiles.
(the width of a spritesheet is 20 cells long)

For grimdark I had
2 x rough
2 x smoothed
2 x block wall
1 x arrow hole.

This is more or less trippling(with HD) the workload. I'm avoiding ramps for now. Aside from me hating to do them, they're not as important for me as a person to do. Sure I'd be ideal in doing them, but in principle someone else could come in and take my work to make ramps out of those. It's much more important we have a consistent stoneset than ramps I think.

(Of course, I'll probably end up making them anyhow if they're too much of an eyesore for me...)
After the defaults, I'm going to be a little selfish and start with whatever tiles I come across first when DF hack updates. It's fun for me to see my fort become prettier with every sprite I add to it, so this'll keep it a bit fun for me to cope with the work-load.

EDIT: Okay, I've looked at the stones list, and have a good idea of how to do this now.

[Solifuge]

I'm just trying to put together a complete listing in a Google Docs file, so we can catalogue what is done, and what needs doing. Also, I'm planning to emulate your style and take a shot at ramps and such when the time comes too. I ought to have the time, since my workload at the new job is pretty light right now.

[Rose]

Oh man, good to have you back on the team.

[Solifuge]

I've always been on the team! I've just been avoiding doing anything resembling work on the project, and have instead been spying on the goings-on from within a lurking field.

I take it you missed all the shitty concept art I hid in some of my erstwhile posts? :3

[Rose]

Incidentally, SS is already working with the latest version, other than missing track tiles.

[Solifuge]

A question for Stonesense users: would you prefer tile designs that convey Dwarf Fortress data, or tile designs that reflect how materials look in nature? More specifically, would you prefer...

A) Stones which match the general stone classifications DF uses (Sedimentary, Igneous Extrusive, Igneous Intrusive, Metamorphic)

or

B) Stones which match general groupings of how the stones appear in nature (Grainy Stone, Foliate Stone, Patterned Stone, Lustrous Stone)