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59 (68.6%)

Total Members Voted: 86

[Melting Sky]

So far nobody has made a tile set specifically designed to obfuscate the game although that might be a really funny thing to do just for fun.

Come again?

I should have known somebody would have done it by now. Gotta love this place.   

[Dark_Author]

In order to learn to play the game at all, I followed a tutorial that had you actually download the game with an included save.  This tutorial used Maydays graphics set in explanations and came with it included in the game.  Its the way I learned to play.  This tutorial/save used build 31, I think, so when I upgraded to the new one last week I made sure to get the LNP and use Maydays graphics just so I know what I'm looking at.  I can't understand the ASCII graphics at all and Maydays set lets me know at a glance if there is a horse or a dog or a goblin and which dwarfs do what jobs (sort of) in my fortress.  I'm sure I could learn to use the ASCII but, it would almost be like relearning to play and I really don't see the need.  I'm not missing anything by using a graphics pack.

[GavJ]

I'm going to take what, I imagine, will be an unpopular position in this discussion. I want to preface it with this: I've been playing PC games for a very long time, and my experience has included a great many rogue-likes with no graphical support. I've seen @s murdered by diacritics so strange and exotic your eyes might not believe them possible were I to type them for you now. I started playing DF with the default tileset and felt perfectly at home doing so; my prior experience had prepared me well for it. But eventually I went graphical. The three friends that I've successfully turned on to DF had no such prior experience, and would not have touched the game were it not for graphical tilesets.

So, my unpopular position is this: an ideal graphical tileset will be de facto superior to ASCII. Let me explain.

By ideal, I mean that each object has a distinct tile that can be distinguished by the majority of players.

Graphics are superior for two reasons:
First, there are MANY more objects in DF than there are unicode characters to represent them. This disparity will only increase as the game develops. Even with colors, there is a finite range of representable objects. While this limit is technically also present in graphical tilesets, they have a functionally unlimited number of objects that can be represented with unique tiles.

The second reason is that graphical tiles are visually isomorphic to the the "real" objects they are meant to represent. For a game whose interface is primarily visual, the value of this cannot be overstated. It brings the game world closer to the player when a cat looks like a cat instead of "c" (which could just as easily be a giant capybara, or even a hatch cover if you're blurry eyed from too many hours of herding dorfs). The human brain is designed to look for these kinds of analogues and make associations with familiar objects. Our ability to appreciate art and symbolism, to suspend disbelief, indulge subjunctives and hypotheticals, even to tell lies, are all bound up with this capacity.

As a final note, I'll add that the most popular tilesets probably have hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours of developement behind them. It seems rude, at the very least, to exhort new players not to use them to conform to your preferences.

This would absolutely be ideal IF POSSIBLE. But right now, it isn't, due to coding restrictions (you can only do special graphics four creatures, not for everything. Why? I have no idea).

If he made it so that every single thing could be reassigned to any position in an arbitrarily large PNG file or files, then yes, individual pictorial glyphs that made sense for each thing would be ideal.

But right now, barrels = pumps, animal traps = small mountains, etc. etc. and there are no clearly depictive glyphs you can make no matter what you do. They have to be abstracted to some degree due to those restrictions, which is the main reason stuff ends up being hard to interpret.

Not just because of them being pictures in general.




Which is why earlier I suggested some sort of wrapper program to allow a LOT more differentiation and to get around those restrictions, and I am currently working on it slowly.  And/or Toady could implement this, and I would be fully behind it, even as a default tile set player.

[wierd]

Grav J:

You DO realize, that this ^ is EXACTLY what I was asking about 2 pages back, right? Being able to assign unique tiles to all object types, not just creatures? That would solve the problems of ramps, grass tiles, The female symbol vs amulet, and male symbol vs bag problem, and everything else?

Yes-- that is what I would REALLY like to see from toady-- not any specific tileset, just a major revamp in the tile loader and assignment system, so that such unique assignments would be possible.

[MaximumZero]

I tried really, really hard to play in ascii. I tried over the course of 4 months to get into the game, and gave up. Then, I found Phoebus' pack and have loved the game ever since. I can't play df, nethack, dcss, or any other game, for that matter, in ascii. Ascii is needlessly confusing, disorienting, and aggravating. I don't understand how anyone plays in it for any extended period of time. Probably has something to do with brain structure and advanced psychology that I don't understand. Still, I think writing a paper discouraging the use of tilesets would be counter-productive. If we want more players (and more support for the Toad,) we should let people play however they damn well please.

[GavJ]

Grav J:

You DO realize, that this ^ is EXACTLY what I was asking about 2 pages back, right? Being able to assign unique tiles to all object types, not just creatures? That would solve the problems of ramps, grass tiles, The female symbol vs amulet, and male symbol vs bag problem, and everything else?

Yes-- that is what I would REALLY like to see from toady-- not any specific tileset, just a major revamp in the tile loader and assignment system, so that such unique assignments would be possible.

I'm confused. I just went back and read that again, and I don't see what your plan is that would accomplish this. It sounded like you were just talking about a standard creature graphics pack, but one that used text-ish glyphs for subtlety, instead of full on graphic animals.

Which sounds cool for sure, and I might even want to use that. But I'm not sure how that solves the issue of bags and male symbols, or animal traps and mountains.

[wierd]

I also agree about the subjective nature of the issue.

Personally, I would like it if toady allowed higher res tiles, and allowed tiles for non creature assets (that way individual bush types could get unique tiles, et al.) That would rub the ascii purists in completely the wrong way, but would make me very happy.  What any individual player is used to seeing is what will determine the degree of unncanny valley syndrome they will have looking at somebody else's screenshots.

To me, the big thing to take away is to just not allow oneself to be bent out of shape because it isnt the way we (as viewers) like it to look. We arent the ones playing, after all.

Right there.   It's something I have wanted for a VERY long time. It would solve so many problems with the use/deployment of tilesets.

I then basically said it again here:

The deal is that Toady has repeatedly mentioned in FotF messages that he and his brother are not terribly good at art, and that they dont feel comfortable asking for the community to produce/support art assets officially. (People come and go, and if the artist stops being responsive to email or other contact about new game inclusions, etc-- it will lead to big problems with maintaining art style etc.)

This is why I dont really feel compelled to ask toady for a default graphics "pack", or for tileset graphics to be the default mode.

Instead, I just want the tileset loader to be worked on to support more variety of tiles and tile sizes. That is completely independent of what he sets as the default mechanism. If he ends up needing to create a default tile asset map to do that, I have no gripes at all about his populating it with images of bitstream vera sans mono rendered glyphs in various colors. (I can replace them with anything I want to make myself later.) To retain support for pure terminal mode, actual ncurses should be kept. I dont feel in any way compelled to ask toady to scrub that just to suit my personal tastes.

I do feel compelled to ask for the skeleton code to load and display more kinds of tiles. that's fundamentally different from demanding that graphics be default, or that a specific pack of graphics be default.

I just want the framework to hang it on.

You just didnt go back in the thread far enough bro. The CP437 tileset was intended as a compromise since a proper solution can't be done at the moment. It would favor the ascii mode graphics users, but give ideogram-based cues for tileset users. It should, theoretically at least, be somewhere in the middle where both sets of users in the user base could read the resulting screenies.

It does not solve the 'female/amulet, male/bag" issue though-- only expanding the tile loader so that a wholly new tile for "amulet" and "bag" can be rendered instead. that means expanding the tile loader to allow more KINDS of tiles-- right now it is limited to ONLY creature type tiles. That's why graphics packs invade the font glyph pack as well at the current time.

[Bumber]

Perhaps a more symbolic but still meaningful style might be nice, like for a cat you could use something along the lines of this:

The cats are now invisible!? It seems they've one-upped dwarven butchers in the evolutionary arms race.

I think you might be interested in this: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=105376

Spoiler: Large Image (click to show/hide)

[Propman]

Meanwhile, in 202X

Amidst the ASCII/tile wars, a third faction, previously unheard of prepares to enter the foray.

The Scripter: "Hahaha! My recently completed 3D model graphic interface for Dwarf Fortress shall forever render those dastardly text fools and their rival tile users irrelevant, as people come flocking to my fully animated masterpiece and toss them aside!"

*Crash*

Yet unknown to The Scripter arrives Imagiman, defender of the imagination and vague ambiguity!

Imagiman: "Fiend! How dare you create these hideous three dimensional polygonal machinations, threatning the ability of Dwarf Fortress players to admire it's raw, unmodified interface like the Toady One meant it to be!"

The Scripter: "You are a fool, Imagiman! Just as he had layed down the foundation for tiled graphics before, the Toady One had made the process of hooking up Dwarf Fortress with a 3D UI possible before I ever began my work! You are old, and obsolete!"

Imagimane: "Lies and casual propaganda are what you spew, The Scripter. Now, face my fist!"

*Pow!*

*Zif!*

*Property damage!*

The Scripter: "No! You have destroyed my Mac! Years of work, ruined!"

Imagiman: "All in a day's work, knave, all in a day's work."

[BoredVirulence]

...
I think you might be interested in this: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=105376

Spoiler: Large Image (click to show/hide)

While totally awesome, and probably a good learning tool for a new player that wants to use ASCII, the clutter (currently) hurts my eyes. The elephant in particular.
But that does make for an awesome compromise. I'd look at screenshots of that, but I would never use it (then again, I have no problems with ASCII, so my opinion doesn't count here).

[Dirac]

Meanwhile, in 202X

DF probably couldn't run on any computers in the year 202X without an FPS cap of 10, judging by how many features are supposed to be added and the fact that single core processors aren't really being innovated anymore.

[Dirst]

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)

This is a planned feature... the map is to use a different tileset than the text.  I have a suggestion rattling around the bottom of the forum that Toady should allow us to specify a tileset for each in-game language.  That way Dwarven can look runic while Elven looks frilly and so on.  The consensus was that the only font aggravating enough to represent kobolds is Comic Sans.

[wierd]

Comic Sans? Please--  Webdings, or maybe (dare I mention its name?) papyrus would be more aggravating than comic sans.

[Dirst]

Comic Sans? Please--  Webdings, or maybe (dare I mention its name?) papyrus would be more aggravating than comic sans.

Papyrus was a close second, and thus belongs to Goblins.  Real-life shops that used Papyrus in their logos don't get my business.

[wierd]

Personally, I think "Kid type 1 crayon" would be better suited to kobolds... Especially if the glyph size was randomly shifted a little on each character.