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[CLA]

Looks great!

[Taffer]

Never mind the GitHub/DFFD churn, it's the exact same release. I've just cleaned up the folder structure a little and transitioned from awkwardly using GitHub to store and push binary releases to using GitHub properly.

[Taffer]

Coming soon: the great kerning update of who knows when, where I hopefully sort out all remaining kerning issues by redrawing half of all of my tilesets. There's plenty here with the potential to annoy--and I have yet to work on the sans-serif--so I don't know if I'll proceed or not. If implemented, everything will be nicely and evenly spaced. Coincidentally, undoes one of my recent changes, but such sacrifice is necessary in the name of pixel perfection.



Also being considered for sacrifice are the last remnants of shading in my entire tileset.



I also made TinyTaffer, inspired by Crazy8x8 and this beautiful looking artwork. It's looking a little squashed, and I still need to work on it a little more. I almost contemplated making this a fully supported variant: then I decided that something is seriously wrong with me. It would bring me from my current 32 supported tilesets to a whopping 64 tilesets. As a reminder, I don't have any tools to automate fixing these things up, I do it all by hand. So no. That's not going to happen. If it gets any attention I might fix it up a little and put it in the miscellaneous tilesets folder in my release. I already know the ice/dirt is looking a little ugly, it's an approach from Crazy8x8 that doesn't translate well into my style.




I'm in even less of a rush than normal and the cup of caring is currently almost empty, so I have no idea when I'll get around to implementing all/some/any of these changes.

Speak up if you like anything in this post, or even if you hate the lot of it.

[Max™]

I like the kerning, still love the dorfletters, and I know that feel on reducing size being troublesome. I just finally got my 32x48 I was happy with reduced to a 24x36 I'm happy with, still tinkering with the 16x24 version for the missus to use on her chromebook, though she thinks it looks great it still looks fuzzy to me. I can't imagine trying to work at 8x8 without going insane.

God kerning is a such a insanity causing rabbit hole at times.

[CLA]

Hard to comment on the kerning without seeing a wall of text comparison.
Regarding the remaining shaded tiles:
Especially the heart and diamond don't benefit from being shaded, and only the clubs and spades symbol look a bit more like real trees with shading. Still, they don't really become worse without shading, and your consistency benefits from it.

So I'd say go for it.

[PGGB]

I appreciate the work on the kerning issue a lot. I've returned to DF after a few years and this tileset is the best of all the ones I've tried by far. By the way making a tool to automate the creation of all the variations shouldn't be too tough if you'd like some help with that.

[Taffer]

I like the kerning, still love the dorfletters, and I know that feel on reducing size being troublesome. I just finally got my 32x48 I was happy with reduced to a 24x36 I'm happy with, still tinkering with the 16x24 version for the missus to use on her chromebook, though she thinks it looks great it still looks fuzzy to me. I can't imagine trying to work at 8x8 without going insane.

God kerning is a such a insanity causing rabbit hole at times.

It is, but I think I've got the kerning mostly sorted by now. I'm not really working on the 8x8 anymore, as it was a little too cramped for my taste.

Hard to comment on the kerning without seeing a wall of text comparison.
Regarding the remaining shaded tiles:
Especially the heart and diamond don't benefit from being shaded, and only the clubs and spades symbol look a bit more like real trees with shading. Still, they don't really become worse without shading, and your consistency benefits from it.

So I'd say go for it.

Oh, I'll be going for it (maybe). I can anticipate a few of the criticisms for the kerning changes, as well, and I've changed my mind on some of it. Whenever I get around to updating, the changelog should hopefully not be extensive as shown in that image. Thank you again for your advice.

I appreciate the work on the kerning issue a lot. I've returned to DF after a few years and this tileset is the best of all the ones I've tried by far. By the way making a tool to automate the creation of all the variations shouldn't be too tough if you'd like some help with that.

You're welcome. Glad you like it. I like sharp, clean, and consistent graphics for Dwarf Fortress.

I'm not certain automating things would be worthwhile. A scripted ImageMagick could be used, but I'm not overly familiar with the tool and don't feel like familiarizing myself. It seems a little daft to write an elaborate script to save me from copying a few tiles several times. The last time I delved into ImageMagick was to automatically generate pixel-art XDM login screen overlays over my currently set background, and that particular rabbit hole consumed more hours of my free time than I'm prepared to admit. (Worse yet, that particular script was lost a week later in a hard drive crash). Thanks for the offer, though.

[Taffer]

Minimal update to 0.43.01, including the keybindings. Life is happening. All current projects put on hold--not abandoned--for the next while (ie, rewritten creature descriptions, updates to my tilesets, updating my DFgraphics repository).

I'll still keep things updated for new releases, but I don't even have DF installed at the moment. I still welcome contributions to the rewritten creature descriptions.

[jecowa]

INTRODUCTION
Attractive Dwarf Fortress graphics that retain the style of the vanilla game, avoid graphical oddities, and don't require--yet support--third party addons. Almost every tile has been redrawn without changing its meaning.

What kind of graphical oddities does this graphics pack avoid, and how does it avoid them?

[Taffer]

What kind of graphical oddities does this graphics pack avoid, and how does it avoid them?

Everything in DF relies on a simple code page (or "ASCII") tileset. These tiles are used and reused everywhere, from menus to the map screen to the game. If you want barrels to look like little pixellated barrels, you also end up with screw pumps that look like barrels. This is so common among tilesets that I've seen fan artwork that depicts screw pumps as barrels. They're not supposed to look like barrels, they just both happen to use the same tile. If you've ever looked around a DF map before embarking and wondered why towns look like backpacks, or wondered why dwarven settlements look like statues, or wondered why goblin camps look like bundles of cloth, or wondered why somebody put traps in the mountains, then you've run into this issue. There's official support for graphics sets, but they only work on living creatures. Worse, in adventure mode they only work on living creatures that are in view of the adventurer. A dog may look like a dog, but if it dies, or it's an engraving of a dog, or you're in adventure mode and the dog is around the corner but still onscreen, it's back to being a 'd', not a nice little dog graphic. CLA cleverly makes all of its animals resemble their original letter, presumably because of this issue.

These are just a very small handful of the issues that come up: personally, they drove me insane when I started playing and I didn't understand why almost every tileset I ran into (including Tocky's tileset, the distant ancestor of my own work) had issues like these that nobody commented on. Fixing the graphical oddities that I encountered with Tocky's set is literally how my set got started. I suppose most users don't mind, or don't notice? Or the users that do mind just play "ASCII"? I'll watch Let's Plays and see screenshots, and I see weirdness everywhere. The world map--or the adventure mode map--make no sense in my opinion with many tilesets. (There's a "trap" to the north, a "backpack" to the west, and a "statue" to the east). Every set that doesn't mimic the vanilla ASCII exactly--or doesn't use TWBT--will have similar "issues". I avoid it by having every tile mean the same thing as the default tileset: if you see an icon, then it's more or less what Toady wanted to be there. Hopefully my version of the tile looks a little nicer. Note that none of this is the fault of the tileset artists, it's just fundamental limitations of the game. My set still has some graphical issues, which are detailed in a text file in the download. These can be fixed by disabling graphics, and are DF bugs.

This hasn't been as big of an issue lately because the DF Starter Pack and some graphics sets use TWBT, a wonderful DFHack plugin. Many of these complaints have been fixed now, as far as I know. I still see oddities in various screenshots, but not as much as I used to. (As a side note, I think that my set would make a wonderful "TWBT font", but nobody seems to have thought of that. I should consider releasing such a plugin)

Apologies for the "mini rant", if I offended anybody. I don't mean to, it's just that I've been seeing confusing bugs for years now in many Reddit or 4chan screenshots and certainly in every Youtube Let's Play, but nobody seems to ever talk about it or express any confusion. Even when people describe why they prefer "ASCII", it's invariably "it lets me use my imagination more", not "there's no graphical weirdness" (the best reason to use ASCII or an ASCII look-alike set, in my opinion).

Considering the (small) conversation I had with Toady and Baughn about the graphics code, nothing official will be done about this anytime soon. Toady's happy reusing his code page graphics and the fans are happy with either TWBT or graphical glitches, if they even notice the presence of either. Hopefully one day Toady cleans up the official graphics code, fixes all of these issues, and lets tileset artists do things they currently can't (like draw a dwarf on top of grass, not instead of grass).

Completely incidentally, I recommend trying out my "dwarf letters" version of the tileset if you want consistency. If I didn't have many users it would be the only supported version. Without graphics enabled you get the most bug-free experience, and by having dwarves represented as letters and not smiley faces their graphics are consistent with every other species in the game.

[Max™]

I do truly love dorfletters, the only reason I've been using my beardies is because I was finally able to emulate the 640x300 ones with a 24x36 set properly (diagonals on all the blocky corners from scaling up the pixels) but I still keep the dorfletter layer in my .xcf to toss out a copy if anyone asks for it (plus the round dorfs) and I totally agree about the clean and consistent behavior argument. Honestly I wouldn't use translucent ground tiles due to the little blocks around them in text, but I love my pretty green quilted meadows too much.

[jecowa]

Thanks for taking the time to explaining it to me. Before I was guessing that the "oddities" mentioned in the main post was referring to the distorted or blurry tiles caused by zooming in. "Linear" mode will blur the tiles when zooming in while "nearest" mode can make the tiles appear distorted when zoomed. I thought your fix for this was making an upscaled 20x20 version of your tileset.

Having mismatched tiles bothers me too, especially when it messes with the text. Having blank tiles instead of periods is the worst offender of this, in my opinion. I don't mind as much with the non-text tiles, though. A barrel might not look like a screw pump, but a division symbol doesn't look too much like one either. And with the barrel screw pump you can pretend like the screw pumps are contained in modified interlocking, water-tight barrels painted grey.

A few of the weird pictures on the world map make a little bit of sense. The trap representing the volcano looks kind of like a caldera. A stone statue representing dwarves make a little sense with dwarves being big into the mining and masonry industries. And I like to pretend that the yellow cup representing elven settlements is a wooden cup. I have no ideas for the velvet cloth and cabinets representing goblins or the blank tiles and different-colored stacks of tires representing humans.

For reference, this is what the world map looks like for me with all the graphical oddities:

Spoiler: "example of graphical oddities in Spacefox 34.11v1.0" (click to show/hide)

I'm not sure why the ocean is brown either. I think the tombstones are hills, and the railroad tracks are rivers.

[Max™]

Just an evil ocean. It happens.

I like the cartoony aesthetic there but I always used the spacefox creatures with a different tileset. Back to pure ascii though.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[jecowa]

Those cyan hills confused me for a bit. I was thinking blue means water, but I guess color has nothing to do with terrain. An evil ocean sounds kind of strange.

[Taffer]

Just for reference, this is an example of a world gen using my default set and colour scheme, in both my 10x10 and 20x20 versions.

10x10

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

20x20

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You can see swamp and tropical forest in the northwest of the island and hills in the east and the south, with plains in the middle. In the northeast, east, and south you can see some menacing goblin fortresses, with goblin pits spreading out to many areas, including to the evil area to the south. There's two necromancer towers in the southeast, and some hamlets and towns in the southeast. The hamlets are clearly related: Æ is a larger hamlet than æ is. Some of the other symbol relations are less clear, but for the most part everything is straightforward once you're familiar with Toady's legend. It's not on this small map, but small rivers also connect with large rivers, getting noticeably bigger without turning into railroads or walls. Some towns are larger than others at a glance, and you can tell that the symbols used (= and ≡) are related to each other. Some hills are larger than others, and the symbols resemble each other. Similarly, the ^ in the middle of the mountain range visually looks like the highest peak in that range, rather than an odd trap. Some time ago I adjusted the sets to make the mountains line up at their bases to better contrast large and small mountains. There are some elves in the west, but unfortunately their symbols (î and ¶) aren't visually related other than colour and there's not a lot I can do about that. The badlands have similar characters (V and √), but they're not as similar as they could be, now that I've noticed it. I'll adjust √ in my next release to make this relationship more visually clear. There are ruins sprinkled throughout the map (μ), coloured according to what it was before it was ruined. I have a pretty good sense of the world and can guess at how history unfolded, and I haven't even started legends mode. It's a little unfortunate that the Let's Plays I've seen don't tend to analyze the map presented and get a sense of the history and geography, they're usually focused exclusively on selecting an optimal fortress location.

To each their own, of course. I understand if you don't like it. To me everything is clear and simple to understand: there's still the "ASCII" as an obstacle, but understanding is a matter of looking at how the characters visually relate to each other rather than simply being a matter of memorization. You don't need to know that tombstones are large hills, you can see that the hill characters are related to each other and that one of them is larger. You can tell what parts of the mountain range are taller at a glance, without needing to turn to a legend. All of this is true whether you use the game's original look, my sets, or any other pure ASCII set. This is probably what people allude to when they talk about ASCII "relying more on your imagination": the symbols start to make better sense in relation to each other, and you start to see the visual relations between the letters that Toady saw when he chose those characters. Technical limitations prevent the wonderful artists here from mimicking this, but I have high hopes for TWBT.

As "artistically nerdy" as this post was, all of this sums most of the motivation for my work: I like the beauty of the original "ASCII", but not the colours chosen or how the characters are drawn. I try to make the character relations a little more clear than they are in vanilla by monkeying with the pixels, and try to make the game as aesthetically pretty (hopefully) as I think it is symbolically pretty.

Note: this is not quite how the next release's world map will look. See a few posts up for the "great kerning update" notes. As mentioned, √ will also be adjusted now to give the badlands characters a better visual relationship.