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[Iliithid]

After some cursory playing with Damascus, 20x is readable and doesn't hurt so much but BOY, 10x on a smaller screen is pretty painful on the eyes especially looking at grass or above ground goings-on with all the noise. Still wonderful but could do with some cleaning up however that's possible, I have no idea how you'd increase readability while maintaining the theme.

[xordae]

I love this tileset, but find the crisp version superior to the smoothed one. Some letters end up looking very off, like W, v, A, r, #. The dwarf smiley and human military icons also have lines bleeding into one another. If it has to be automated from here on, I'd recommend using a less 'smart' and more crisp algo for upscaling. EPX is an excellent one for pixelly upscaling.

[Droggarth]

The new default letters were the first thing I noticed after I updated to .44.09 and the main reason so far why it hasn't bothered me really is excatly what Iliithid said.
In a strange way though it has this very slight ye olden feel to it while not sacrificing readability and wow does 20x20 look much better and is also easier on my eyes, been like a fool in the past using only 10x10 on my 1680x1050 monitor (tbh, I was a blind raging fool in general in the past when I first joined the forum and I'm not ashamed to admit it because it was just unacceptable, faulty and toxic behaviour in general from me).

Takes only one mouse scroll up to adjust my screen to be less large now while 10x10 needed a few mouse scrolls down to make the tiny letters larger thus appearing muddy and loss of quality very apparent. I love the happy vibrancy of your alternative color sceme, Taffer. Without your tilesets the game's original colors feel like they burn into my eyes while most of the darker color schemes here are just too dark for me. The more vibrant color scheme feels like a happy medium between vanilla and the dark default color of this tileset pack to me.

[Taffer]

After some cursory playing with Damascus, 20x is readable and doesn't hurt so much but BOY, 10x on a smaller screen is pretty painful on the eyes especially looking at grass or above ground goings-on with all the noise. Still wonderful but could do with some cleaning up however that's possible, I have no idea how you'd increase readability while maintaining the theme.

I'll fix up the font a little, to make playing at 10x a little more bearable. I might experiment with removing the line entirely, but I'll first see if just adding a pixel or two of separation between the letters and the line is enough.

I confess to being a little bewildered by the point aobut grass and ground: I love the way grass and the ground look in Damascus. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I want to clean it up more. Having lots of noise is exactly what I like about the tileset. I'm not sure how much it affects readability, personally: perhaps I just need to play with it more. There used to be lots of noise around the letters, but that's been pared back significantly. I suppose its hard to tell the difference between a period and a comma, but that's not really necessary when you're looking at the ground, and obvious in context for sentences. I'll think about it.

Thank you for the critique!

I love this tileset, but find the crisp version superior to the smoothed one. Some letters end up looking very off, like W, v, A, r, #. The dwarf smiley and human military icons also have lines bleeding into one another. If it has to be automated from here on, I'd recommend using a less 'smart' and more crisp algo for upscaling. EPX is an excellent one for pixelly upscaling.

I actually agree that the crisp version is (in some ways) superior to the smoothed one, but I'm a perfectionist at heart and I've never liked my work with the double-sized sets. The maintenance burden of the sets has definitely kept me from working. There's been a few changes I wanted to make to the tilesets (that I don't even recall now), but the thought of having to update 24 tilesets, then redraw my change, and then update another 24, just absolutely killed my motivation every time. I much prefer having just the 10x10 sets to think about. Sorry! That being said, some users do prefer the scaled version, so it's not all bad.

Thank you for the suggestions, though! I want to get the scaling done as good as I can. I'll try scale2x, which is already built into ImageMagick, which is based on EPX. Hopefully that makes the double-sized sets cleaner. I can also easily fix the bleeding issue with the dwarf and human graphics: I thought I could get away with scaling the image directly, without chopping it into bits first. It'll be a bit more scripting work, but easily fixed.

The new default letters were the first thing I noticed after I updated to .44.09 and the main reason so far why it hasn't bothered me really is excatly what Iliithid said.
In a strange way though it has this very slight ye olden feel to it while not sacrificing readability and wow does 20x20 look much better and is also easier on my eyes, been like a fool in the past using only 10x10 on my 1680x1050 monitor (tbh, I was a blind raging fool in general in the past when I first joined the forum and I'm not ashamed to admit it because it was just unacceptable, faulty and toxic behaviour in general from me).

Takes only one mouse scroll up to adjust my screen to be less large now while 10x10 needed a few mouse scrolls down to make the tiny letters larger thus appearing muddy and loss of quality very apparent. I love the happy vibrancy of your alternative color sceme, Taffer. Without your tilesets the game's original colors feel like they burn into my eyes while most of the darker color schemes here are just too dark for me. The more vibrant color scheme feels like a happy medium between vanilla and the dark default color of this tileset pack to me.

Glad you like the update! I haven't really played with my Taffer tileset in years, to be honest. I'm happy to hear that somebody likes it: I contemplated removing it from the download in order to further shrink things. I'll keep it part of the set.

[xordae]

Tried it yesterday.. it looks quite good except for one fringe case. You can see it where two wall icons meet and the corners sort of 'invert'. I wonder if EPX does the same thing.  The only implementation I could find is here. Snes9X also uses it.

   

[Iliithid]

After some cursory playing with Damascus, 20x is readable and doesn't hurt so much but BOY, 10x on a smaller screen is pretty painful on the eyes especially looking at grass or above ground goings-on with all the noise. Still wonderful but could do with some cleaning up however that's possible, I have no idea how you'd increase readability while maintaining the theme.

I'll fix up the font a little, to make playing at 10x a little more bearable. I might experiment with removing the line entirely, but I'll first see if just adding a pixel or two of separation between the letters and the line is enough.

I confess to being a little bewildered by the point aobut grass and ground: I love the way grass and the ground look in Damascus. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I want to clean it up more. Having lots of noise is exactly what I like about the tileset. I'm not sure how much it affects readability, personally: perhaps I just need to play with it more. There used to be lots of noise around the letters, but that's been pared back significantly. I suppose its hard to tell the difference between a period and a comma, but that's not really necessary when you're looking at the ground, and obvious in context for sentences. I'll think about it.

Thank you for the critique!

After some more playing it became clearer that I was just used to playing with cleaner tilesets for sooo long that the noise threw me off. It's gotten easier to discern between tiles after a while, though I still definitely prefer to play at 20x when I can, especially if I find myself reading a lot of legends or expedition notes.

[Max™]

Compare these two tilesets:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As mentioned, I didn't need to open an image editor even once for the one on the left, I just ran my script.

With this, release of the next version will happen soonish. I've redrawn Moscow's walls, so the tetris look is gone but ornate, diagonal are in for two sets now. Even with the new script, the fancy tilesets might just be crudely doubled. It depends on how well xbrz deals with the fine details.

I love them both for the record.

[Taffer]

I changed the scaling algorithm to scale2x, as suggested. I'm not sure how to proceed, actually, but this will do for now. It doesn't look perfect, but it looks good enough for the moment.

[Taffer]

I reshuffled my git repositories to their final locations. I'd already changed my username, but now they're in a new dwarf-fortress group on Gitlab as a new home, and I have my projects under one namespace.

This also lets me maintain private forks of my work on Gitlab.

[jecowa]

I guess you got rid of anti-aliasing in v5.2 because you didn't like the way it looks when it was resizes in-game?

[Taffer]

I guess you got rid of anti-aliasing in v5.2 because you didn't like the way it looks when it was resizes in-game?

The transparent background? That was removed because I switched from xBRZ to scale2x/EPX as suggested here:

I love this tileset, but find the crisp version superior to the smoothed one. Some letters end up looking very off, like W, v, A, r, #. The dwarf smiley and human military icons also have lines bleeding into one another. If it has to be automated from here on, I'd recommend using a less 'smart' and more crisp algo for upscaling. EPX is an excellent one for pixelly upscaling.

The ImageMagick implementation doesn't seem to support antialiasing for that algorithm, as the aliased portions in the output were in magenta, even when I fiddled with the options.

[xordae]

Yeah the algo specifically does not do any subpixel smoothing but only crisp resizes.

I think it looks great like this, but it's obviously a matter of taste.
I also have the full 20x tileset still in use on my other machine if anyone is looking for it.

[Taffer]

I think it looks great like this, but it's obviously a matter of taste.

Thank you kindly!

I also have the full 20x tileset still in use on my other machine if anyone is looking for it.

The entire history of my work should already be available in the Git history (at least, starting from when I switched to Git).

[draeath]

Not really a fan of the rounder look since 5.0.4. I preferred the more "classic" angular characters. (i use '20x/taffer/tilesets/dwarves_as_letters/sans-serif/hollow_straight_walls')

My opinion, if you'll have it? Revert the scaler change! 

You also see a lot more aliasing on some of the symbols, for example the whole top row. It just looks... much worse.

Side-by-side comparison. The good/old set on the left, the new roundy bad set on the right.

[Taffer]

Not really a fan of the rounder look since 5.0.4. I preferred the more "classic" angular characters. (i use '20x/taffer/tilesets/dwarves_as_letters/sans-serif/hollow_straight_walls')

My opinion, if you'll have it? Revert the scaler change! 

You also see a lot more aliasing on some of the symbols, for example the whole top row. It just looks... much worse.

For the moment, I intend to use "box" or simple scaling for the 20x20 sets. I'll make that change when I can. Things will look a bit boxier, but every tileset will at least be pixel accurate to the 10x10 sets.

I'll consider bringing back the old sets, at least in part. Part of the problem is that I have a big readability overhaul planned (or attempt at an overhaul, because I don't know if it'll work), and I don't particularly want to redraw 20x20 sets again. But my tilesets can be unpleasant to read at times, and I want to make an effort to fix that. (It's especially annoying, given all of my effort in Revised to make DF more fun to read). If that means that people have to put up with blocky 20x20 sets, then all I can say is sorry (and invite somebody else to draw them for me). I don't have the free time that I used to, I'm not well lately, and Revised has been taking most of my DF attention. But legibility is more important to me than refusing to improve things for the sake of the larger sets.

Thank you for the feedback!