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No

59 (68.6%)

Total Members Voted: 86

[Dirac]

we can and do all understand what each tileset (or lack thereof) represents.

No, I fail to understand almost anything that's going on, quite often.

Out of curiosity, do you use a certain tileset yourself, or do you prefer the default ASCII set?

[FrankMcFuzz]

There is no quicker divider in the Dwarf Fortress community as the tilesets-vs-ascii argument.

It's my belief that if I took 10 open-minded individuals and you took 10 open-minded individuals, and tried to show them Dwarf Fortress in say, a 1 hour course or something, I believe more would stick with it in the tileset group than the ones with the ASCII.

But that's purely speculation. Can we get any University professor Dorfort players to do some !!SCIENCE!!? For a controlled test, take the same 10 individuals from the tileset test and wipe their memory and then show them Ascii. or vice versa.

But in all seriousness, I use Phoebus tileset and also really like Mayday, although quite honestly I sometimes wish I had learned with the ASCII, as I don't understand some of the beautiful screenshots people post of vanilla DF ascii glory. But I have played Dwarf Fortress since 2010 now and I an avid supporter of the game. I did fumble a little with ascii art on my very first evening of playing. I cut down a tree and created a pond zone that wasn't actually a pond and then built a kennel, got the shits and followed a comprehensive tileset-inclusive tutorial save online.

You can't say one way is better than any other, though tilesets do seem to be geared towards newer players and friends or family that you may show the game to. They're just 2 different ways of experiencing the same amazing game underneath.

[GavJ]

Out of curiosity, do you use a certain tileset yourself, or do you prefer the default ASCII set?

ASCII.

Or actually, I use tilesets, but ones that are mostly ASCII while changing things like aspect ratio or walls or fonts selectively, etc.

[itg]

...quite honestly I sometimes wish I had learned with the ASCII, as I don't understand some of the beautiful screenshots people post of vanilla DF ascii glory

I finally decided to learn ASCII in order to be ready for the new release. If you just switch an existing fort from your tileset to ASCII, it's a really smooth transition. There will be much, much less "what the hell does that symbol mean," because you already know what you're looking at. I also found it helps if you zoom in a lot, since ASCII really isn't designed for modern high-res screens.


I don't really get the complaints that tileset screenshots are hard to understand for ASCII users. I can easily read screenshots using tilesets other than the one I use, and it's not any smaller of a leap from one tileset to another than it is from ASCII to a tileset. Screwpumps and the ends of bridges are the only mildly confusing objects I can think of offhand, since they reuse the barrel and chair symbols respectively, but once you know that, it doesn't phase you.

[FrankMcFuzz]

...quite honestly I sometimes wish I had learned with the ASCII, as I don't understand some of the beautiful screenshots people post of vanilla DF ascii glory

I don't really get the complaints that tileset screenshots are hard to understand for ASCII users. I can easily read screenshots using tilesets other than the one I use, and it's not any smaller of a leap from one tileset to another than it is from ASCII to a tileset. Screwpumps and the ends of bridges are the only mildly confusing objects I can think of offhand, since they reuse the barrel and chair symbols respectively, but once you know that, it doesn't phase you.

My biggest complaint about the ascii is that it's not square, so if you dig out a 10x10 room it looks like a 8x15 room. It seems taller, it makes it a bit hard for myself, someone who suffers from sever symmetricalitis, to get visually nice looking rooms.

[GavJ]

My biggest complaint about the ascii is that it's not square, so if you dig out a 10x10 room it looks like a 8x15 room. It seems taller, it makes it a bit hard for myself, someone who suffers from sever symmetricalitis, to get visually nice looking rooms.

Often, I will just dig out oval rooms in such a way that they look circular in a tall tileset.
That or use one of the multitude of square ASCII tilesets that use all the exact same symbols but just in a different aspect ratio.

This can all cause major issues though in something like a succession fort, where the next guy does it differently and now has weird oval rooms.

[wierd]

I have actually considered doing a very whimsical thing, and just taking the CP437 font in square glyph mode (there is such a thing! CGA cards had an 8x8 version of the font.) and rendering the text in various colors, and building a "Graphics Pack" out of it.

Spoiler: CGA version of CP437 (click to show/hide)

The 8x8 fonts were part of the IBM CGA adaptor rom.



There was a "CGA compatible" (ahem) alternative card from WYSE technologies
called a WY-700, that had 16x16 font and 32x32 font, which would probably look better scaled.

I could then somewhat combine ascii graphics with maybe some helpful ideograms ([H] and [H](with a little sword under it) for example?)  to help graphics pack users out, and to add some clarity. (That way you can more easily tell that that is a HUMAN merchant, followed by a Human caravan guard (swordsman), and NOT two hippos. )

Maybe two versions-- one with ideograms, and one without.  Would be fun to do that and call it "Classic Console" or something. The VGA versions of the font dont have the same retro feel.

[Rogue Yun]

I have actually considered doing a very whimsical thing, and just taking the CP437 font in square glyph mode (there is such a thing! CGA cards had an 8x8 version of the font.) and rendering the text in various colors, and building a "Graphics Pack" out of it.

Oh wierd! Please do! I would love to see it! I am making little weapons in my 12x12 graphics set to stick in the bottom right-hand corner and I would love to see what you do! And to see you on the Modding Tileset Forum would be a treat. Please! Oh Please, oh please, oh please!!!

I think we should be encouraged to create as many graphics packs and ascii tilesets as possible. Anything to encourage more people to play DF. Heck, I can't get a single one of my friends to cross the threshold and play DF. They take one look at the screen no matter what graphics pack I am using and then go off to lesser games... And if anyone doesn't like the way a graphics set or tileset looks they should be bold enough to tell us (those working on graphicsets and tilesets) what they don't like so we can make changes and improvements.

*shameless plug*
I know there are people who are much better at making graphicsets and tilesets than I am... but it would sure help me if I could get some feedback. *sigh*

[GavJ]

Perhaps an effective method for describing the graphics to non-players would be to arrange a number of images in two columns, with "game display" on the one side, and "how an experienced player sees that" on the other.  For example:


Left side: (actual screenshot version of) ".,,.k@.,.,"
Right side:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

or
Left side: ".>.,@.,.,E.,>,"
Right side:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[WanderingKid]

Perhaps an effective method for describing the graphics to non-players would be to arrange a number of images in two columns, with "game display" on the one side, and "how an experienced player sees that" on the other.

The crux of the issue,  GavJ.  Would you consider me an inexperienced player? Life is perception.

[GavJ]

Perhaps an effective method for describing the graphics to non-players would be to arrange a number of images in two columns, with "game display" on the one side, and "how an experienced player sees that" on the other.

The crux of the issue,  GavJ.  Would you consider me an inexperienced player? Life is perception.

My post was not intended to have anything to do with tileset discussions. I was responding to the poster above me who talked about how friends were turned off of the game "no matter what tileset." That's who I'm referring to - people you know from school or work who have never played it, and who you are trying to entice.

Go ahead and amend my plan to this:

Left column: ASCII .,.,.,@.,.,.,E.,.,.,
Center column: graphic tiles [graphic tiles version of above]
Right column: artist / mental interpretation of experienced players that you can be sure you would have after getting to know the game.

Slightly more informative and probably slightly more effective in recruiting.



Labeled:
"Default graphics"
"If you prefer, it can look like this" (actually include a few tilesets and maybe stonesense)
"Regardless, you will soon think of it like this" (artist render)

[Dirac]

I could then somewhat combine ascii graphics with maybe some helpful ideograms ([H] and [H](with a little sword under it) for example?)  to help graphics pack users out, and to add some clarity. (That way you can more easily tell that that is a HUMAN merchant, followed by a Human caravan guard (swordsman), and NOT two hippos. )

That would be nice.  The CLA graphics pack does something similar to help distinguish creatures, though of course they replaced periods and commas with blank tiles, which makes it very irritating to read logs and creature statuses/descriptions.  I would love to see a graphics tile set that doesn't change the punctuation but does have some ideograms.

[GavJ]

A nice project would be to make a wrapper program that simply takes the DF graphics, and spits them out exactly the same for the portion of the screen with text, but translates the portion that's graphics to other symbols based on a second png file. And takes all keyboard and mouse input and passes it along back to DF.

The program wouldn't have to actually know what anything means to work (unlike an actual, full feature wrapper program). But it would allow de-coupling every single text glyph from its text versus other uses.

(edit: For extra runtime speed it could upon startup parse through the main tileset file and determine which specific pixels were sufficiently diagnostic of each glyph procedurally, and then only check those when reading the screen. OR even better, have a machine barcode tileset that you just use if you want to use this, for maximum easy efficiency, and then it reads both text and nontext from special files made for it. So the actual DF screen will look like gibberish but who cares)

[GavJ]

OR even better, have a machine barcode tileset

Each pixel is 3x3. First pixel establishes the background color. Algorithms can then check the next 8 for which ones are something other than that color. If they are, that bit get's a "1" otherwise "0" which gives you your byte that tells you which glyph you are looking at, as efficiently as possible (?).

You can then look that up in your other custom tables for what the wrapper displays. And any of the "1" bits along with the reference pixel will tell you which two colors the tile has, in order to reproduce those accurately in the mimic window. (except the empty tile, which I don't think is used, but even if it is, it only has one color displayed, so not a problem).

Starts at "1" goes to "255" right before the lower right glyph, which is "0"



(lol)





...actually, I'll just move this to the modding forum if/when i finish the next step (will actually try to make a wrapper)

[LBR]

The only thing you should do is make a chart with the default ASCII graphics and different tilesets for comparison, so said "newbs" can decide for themselves.