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[Ashsaber]

Because

1. I like being able to see a massive amount of terrain at once; the graphic packs generally don't cover a large enough area for my liking. Catastrophe is best viewed in its entirety.

2. The graphic pack grounds tilesets are generally either too bland (hard to tell what from what) or too blatant (Green to Brown to Green to Brown to..etc). The default tileset lets me know that the tile is different without being "in my face" about it. Happy medium, really.

3. The tilesets make the text look bad. This is actually a major point for me, as I like having text that look pretty. 

and

4. My brain is conditioned.

[Putnam]

Mousewheel zooms, you know >_>

[Langolier]

I started playing on my netbook. I was too scared to push it so I didn't add any tile sets or mods like therapist. Now that my brain is attuned to it, I just play with ASCII. But apparently my netbook is a little more of a champ than I thought. Currently have a population of 150 and haven't noticed any problems yet.

[sadron]

I use square ascii graphics, I don't like the rectangular look to the default tileset, it looks weird.

[Armv]

I'll start using tile sets when they aren't all cluttered, muddy, and lacking of distinction. ASCII if far more vibrant, being full of contrast and defined shapes.

...'course I played NetHack for a decade before DF came about.

[Sus]

ASCII if far more vibrant, being full of contrast and defined shapes.

...'course I played NetHack for a decade before DF came about.

I think I can second this as well.

[Starver]

Every screenshot or video I see on these forums use it. I can't stand it, the newer graphics pack is so awesome grass is green, dirt is brown you can see what things are, everything is not weird symbols.

But in the end I don't care what you use, use what you like. I'm just curious, seems like using a horse and buggy when there is a shiny sports car.

(Unless it is some hipster thing, then.....you are grounded)

We're seven pages in, I see, so I know I'm probably repeating, but I'm putting down my immediate thoughts to the OP, just for the record:
1) No, not every screenshot/video on these forums uses the default graphics.
2) Personally, I find it harder to interpret wierd glyphs than the standard symbols.
3) I don't really care either, except that until/unless there's a standard 'graphical version'[1], I'm never going to be as happy with a random 'painted' version of a kobold as a quite obvious 'k'.
4) I apologise to those that don't know that 'k' is (at least in the context of such a creature making an incursion) a kobold, maybe that's a problem with LNP-users going straight to graphics?
5) Whereas it's sometimes the case that a given (raw graphics) character could be one of several things, I find that things that don't have the same character can look surprisingly similar when drawn.  Either way, that's when you cursor over it, for example to check whether it's a member of the goose family or a particular specialisation of goblin.  (If context and behaviour doesn't make it obvious.)
6) It may look like a horse and buggy, but it still does 0-60 in 3 seconds, the same as the sportscar.  (Or, upon a different computer: It may look like a sportscar, but it still barely and painfully lumbers on at walking pace.)  The engine (or lack thereof) is the same.  You'd be on firmer ground comparing a keyboard and mouse to a Minority Report-style touchscreen thingummy...  Although (with respect, and perhaps revealing my predilections towards such developments) I'll stick to my keyboard and mouse (and mainly keyboard, at that).
7) A Hipster?  The modern Hipster (1990s era) is probably what you mean, but is a little too 'nouveau', for my tastes.  The 1940s 'original' (certainly original by that name) group of alternate artistic tastes (amongst other things) is before my time.  I suppose I should be more influenced by the late '60s, early '70s.  Or am I rebelling against that?  No.  What I (probably) am,is someone who had for a long time been happy with a keyboard as input (not even a mouse, for quite a long time!) and screens that as often as not displayed 80x25 characters or less[2] through which I could still view and interpret the whole of the world within the computer, a bit like Tank/whoever sees the Woman In Red in the Matrix.  It just works...


But, as I said, probably well-ninjaed on all these points (as I shall find out, shortly, when I start plodding through the thread), just wanted to say...

[1] Noting that even the ANSI-like tileset is technically graphical.
[2] There were otehr resolutions and actual graphical options (aside from redefining the pixelations of various characters).  And you 'Teletext' graphics (e.g.  Mode 7 on the BBC Microcomputer), with the inherent limitations of colour and, indeed, colour changes.  And there were various sub-EGA (and often monochrome) actual graphics displays in the early days, as well as straight on vector-drawing ones.  Did you ever play that original BattleTank arcade game?  (Although that was probably vectors rendered as raster, memory fails.)  Sorry, going all nostalgic...

[Eric Blank]

The only thing "better" about graphics packs is that you can have individual icons for creatures and jobs within races instead of positions in races being indicated by simple color changes and several creatures sharing the same letter.

Actually, the creature graphics is separate from the ASCII set, so you can have little pictures for your dudes and ASCII tiles for everything else. The graphical tilesets are actually modified ASCII tilesets, and are what makes your pumpstack look like barrels and prepared meals instead of a proper pump stack. But you can have a dwarf running a pumpstack, or a ☺ furiously rotating a barrel, or a dwarf furiously rotating a barrel.

[Starver]

Same reason why it's good form to send e-mail in plaintext.

A lost art, that.  You often have to go into the settings of even the geekiest modern (not fully console-based) email programs to persuade it not to send mails in MIME-encoded HTML or something equally ridiculous...

Code: ({0}) [Select]

Ah for the days when *emphasis* and /stress/ and _other_important_points_ all fit within an extra two bytes, or so
(but of *seven* bits, each, regardless), rather than the (now deprecated) <b></b> and the even /longer/, and newer,
<strong></strong>...  Or <span class="bold"></span> with a whole heap of associated CSS (and sometimes even
Javascript!) to support this possibly trivial formatting point...  And have you seen how MSOffice renders to HTML
the **plainest** of documents?

[1] And there's good reasons to separate markup indicating a relative type of verbal stressing from an arbitrary
visual...  Hence why the <i> to <em> and <b> to <strong> shifts, amongst others.

I know bytes are cheap, these days[1], but I feel something has been lost.[/derail]


{0} While it looks like I was trying to make a point here, I mainly 'Code'd this section (and moved the other footnote into it) because the forum insisted on rendering 'bare' HTML, and I couldn't be bothered to work out how to manually 'denature' the individual bits so they'd show 'raw'.

[krenshala]

Same reason why it's good form to send e-mail in plaintext.

A lost art, that.  You often have to go into the settings of even the geekiest modern (not fully console-based) email programs to persuade it not to send mails in MIME-encoded HTML or something equally ridiculous...

Code: ({0}) [Select]

Ah for the days when *emphasis* and /stress/ and _other_important_points_ all fit within an extra two bytes, or so
(but of *seven* bits, each, regardless), rather than the (now deprecated) <b></b> and the even /longer/, and newer,
<strong></strong>...  Or <span class="bold"></span> with a whole heap of associated CSS (and sometimes even
Javascript!) to support this possibly trivial formatting point...  And have you seen how MSOffice renders to HTML
the **plainest** of documents?

[1] And there's good reasons to separate markup indicating a relative type of verbal stressing from an arbitrary
visual...  Hence why the <i> to <em> and <b> to <strong> shifts, amongst others.

I know bytes are cheap, these days[1], but I feel something has been lost.[/derail]


{0} While it looks like I was trying to make a point here, I mainly 'Code'd this section (and moved the other footnote into it) because the forum insisted on rendering 'bare' HTML, and I couldn't be bothered to work out how to manually 'denature' the individual bits so they'd show 'raw'.

This is why I still use a console based email client (mutt).   And have you seen the file size of a supposedly empty MS Word document recently?  Last time I checked it was over 20Kbytes! Even at 2 bytes per character thats over 10 thousand characters in an otherwise unused file!

On topic, I look forward to the day when we can, if we wish, do with the map tiles what we can currently do with the creatures that run around in it: map them to specific images, with a fallback to a specific extended ASCII character.  With that, I can use vanilla (square) ASCII when I'm in the mood for it, and use some really fancy "graphics" otherwise (currently using Phoebus, Vidumek or Bisasam 16x16 tilesets, depending no how I feel).

[Starver]

(And bottom-posting FTW!  Or betwixt each point, intermingled, with responses to each paragraph (or segment of text that remains after excising the unecessary) appearing immediately below their respective targets.  Encourages better editing.  You've all seen (if not committed to email yourself) a top-posting monstrosity consisting of many generations of largely one-line responses followed by ten-line signature/sign-offs followed by the prior author's text and their sign-off, and a scroll-bar to one side indicating that this is how it goes on for many pages!)

On the square/non-square debate, I don't mind the default, un-squared, layout.  My mind already compensates well enough for the distortion.  And when the screen is laid out as a the usual (untabbed) triptych layout, the narrower characters help fit more map into the map-third.  Not so many square characters would fit in sideways (unless going for a smaller equivalent-font), so less of a view at a single glance.

(Although I admit I also often set the window's lines of height to double the default and the columns of width to 1.5 the default (50 and 120, respectively, I'm sure that'd be. without checking), in the appropriate Init file, with the addition width and height adding purely to the map-third, so perhaps I could afford to 'waste a bit of width'.)

[Sutremaine]

I too like the way how most graphics packs make it easier to see, for an example, which dwarves are military and which civilians or if the thing stomping your little dorflings is a bronze collosus or just another mule.

I'll grant that bipedal and quadripedal creatures are probably easier to tell apart in graphics than a goblin lasher and a goblin swordsman, but a mule is M and a bronze colossus is C. They're easy to tell apart visually.

Goats and goblin spearmen would probably be a better example because they both share a g, but a goblin's presence is announced and a goat's isn't. Even if circumstances are such that there could be goblins in your goat pasture, you could either k over the offending g or observe its behaviour and the behaviour of the creatures around it for a few ticks.

[GoombaGeek]

I too like the way how most graphics packs make it easier to see, for an example, which dwarves are military and which civilians or if the thing stomping your little dorflings is a bronze collosus or just another mule.

I'll grant that bipedal and quadripedal creatures are probably easier to tell apart in graphics than a goblin lasher and a goblin swordsman, but a mule is M and a bronze colossus is C. They're easy to tell apart visually.

Goats and goblin spearmen would probably be a better example because they both share a g, but a goblin's presence is announced and a goat's isn't. Even if circumstances are such that there could be goblins in your goat pasture, you could either k over the offending g or observe its behaviour and the behaviour of the creatures around it for a few ticks.

People keep mentioning loo[k], but [v]iew unit is what I use because it automatically zooms to the nearest unit.

Also, bronze colossus is actually C. Wikipedia has a nice article on web colours that helped me with getting the exact shade I wanted on these forums.

[doublestrafe]

Also, bronze colossus is actually C.

Isn't it both? Don't bronze colossi flash?

[Alastar]

I care little about how advanced a graphical standard is, and much about how well it's implemented.

A nice hand-drawn look is perfectly achievable with good old VGA, and it often looks better than later attempts: resolution was good enough for that aesthetic and low enough that pixel-perfect finish was realistic.
Attempts to push technology will often wow an audience who hasn't seen anything like it before, but age badly. Early 3d games look ridiculous today (and I hated the look even when it was fresh).
I still wince whenever I see failed attempts at realism (loose fabrics, character movement, faces out of the uncanny valley...).

This applies to DF too: The same little details and animations that are cute in ANSI (surprising that they exist at all) can look crude in graphical tilesets (surprising that they're sudden full-tile swaps rather than something smoother).