Hey Meph, what's the history about deploying a graphic set without the accented characters? So far I've only notice Phoebus pulling that off.
(eliminating accented characters would be great)
Since accented characters are only used in text, and the text is made up of words in the language files, all it takes is replaces all á,à and â with a. And so forth. There should be several standardized word and language files flying around for this. I guess just borrowing the ones from ironhand or phoebus should be fine.
Getting rid of accented characters is easy.
After I categorized everything and "assigned" them to tiles, it would be as easy as editing the raws to use this new graphical setup. You could even edit creatures to use general sprites! Like, instead of letters, all fish would use a generic fish character. Forest creatures could use a generic quadraped sprite, avians would use a generic bird sprite...I've already done this with the demon and @.
So would this idea work? Is it too out there? What kind of obstacles would I run into? Would people be willing to download edited raws to make this thing work? If this kind of thing would be possible, I'll be holding it off until I finish the standard graphics set. I have no idea how long this would take or how complicated it might become. But the implications would be incredible...Combined with a graphics set, every single creature and every single raw-editable object would have a graphic for it! Toady wouldn't need to add full graphics support, because Dwarf Fortress would make the most of Code Page 437, editing it for it's own needs!
That doesnt work. You cant remap the tilenumbers for most items. Chests are always one tile, coffins are always the '0'. Barrles, wells, logs, mugs, quivers, all these are hardcoded to their respective tiles. They are not in the raws.
Only creatures are in the raws (you can ignore them, because they use sprites), tools, plants, inorganics. And buildings. I use a lot of unique graphics for modded buildings, but of course that doesnt make sense here, as this is a tileset for vanilla DF.
Vermin also use tiles, but can be edited in the raws. For example I use inverted letter tiles for them, as I mentioned before. Wouldnt work on your set, because of the drop shadow. Just saying that inverted tiles are a neat way to use the same tile twice, for different graphics. Ironhand made a nice example of that, showing his crab/spider/lobster or the mouse/snake/squirrel tile. 2 tiles, 6 graphics.
You could even edit creatures to use general sprites!
But why? People couldnt see the difference between a undead killer whale (I know, not a fish by definition) and a trout. Or between trout, eel or manta ray.
I just noticed Aesomatica uses colors, particularly in the switches and trees. How does that work and what does it do?
The ingame graphics are made up of 3 colors. The color of the tile. The foreground color. The background color.
The tile ingame will take the color the way its painted, as can be seen on the magenta mushroom. But all solid color in it will get a hue. The hue is the foreground color. So to make the magenta tile look magenta ingame, the foreground color must be... white. 7:0:1. This way its not changed. You can see I also made a yellow and a green hue, which is done in the raws. 2:0:1 and 6:0:1. The background color fills all the transparent parts. I made the grass around the mushroom transparent, so you can color the grass independantly from the mushroom. You can see its black, white, white, green, green, green on the six mushroom examples. Even if I make the foreground color green, white or yellow, the grass stays green.
This allows fancy tricks. For example the top right is a river tile, but inverted it looks like a railroad. The letter C includes a moth. Its invisible in text, but the vermin uses an inverted C as tile, and shows the background color. Foreground color is black, hiding the C. Also lobster/spider. I have beetle/crab, bee/bat and splint/rat that way.
Below the line you can see different uses for background color. You can fill containers, like the bucket. I use this on mugs, flasks, minecarts, buckets... example shows an empty one, a water and a blood bucket. The little spheres are either marbles, seeds or musket bullets. The 5 bullets on the left are foreground color, the 7 bullets on the right are background color, and in the center you can see both combined. Thats taken from the Phoebus set.
And the walls: Engraved walls. Green Runes (inverted wall with green background), and normal wall.
In the end it allows a lot more freedom when designing buildings and plants and inorganics.