This game is ASCII, right? But it uses OpenGL to render that. So instead of just having the standard CGA colors, it actually has 16.7 million colors (256 red x 256 green x 256 blue).
What if instead of showing an "open tile" when the space per Z-level is empty, one were to show a darker version of what is one z-level below. And if the tile below that is empty, show what's below that a little darker still, so on and so forth until the color would be fully washed out to the target color and it would just show a solid color.
Here's a mockup of what that might look like, using the current cyan "open space" color as an additive:
Zoomed out, with the lower levels faded, you can see here that it's really not too much information for a player to handle. That there is representative of 10 Z-levels of what, formerly, was sky.
Each level is clearly defined, and you can even see the curve of the slope as it falls into the (now frozen) lake.
I really think this would be:
1) Fairly simple to do with the current engine
2) Totally within the ASCII style of the original game
3) A great use of the OpenGL rendering engine
4) Incredibly worthwhile.
Rendering this would not hurt the frame rate, either. Basically nobody ever has any problem rendering the game due to it's Graphical FPS. All current frame rate bottlenecks are entirely calculations based, and this rendering technique would add very few new calculations. It would just read more squares per frame.
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This suggestion has been brought up several times before:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=41266.0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVhsIGGg3QEhttp://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30114.0http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=1788.msg27962#msg27962And is on the Eternal Suggestions list at a far lower priority than it probably ought to be, given how relatively simple the suggestion would be to complete vs how focused the suggestion is and how long it's been desired:
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/eternal_voting.phpMy further suggestion is to deffinitely use the color of the Open Space tile for the fading, as that will allow both above ground "fog" and below ground "gloom" within the same system. A user could change the behavior simply by changing the color of the Open Space/Chasm tiles in d_init.txt.