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27 (31.4%)

No

59 (68.6%)

Total Members Voted: 86

[Sadrice]

While tilesets and graphics are totally arbitrary, and you should use whatever the hell you please, it has always annoyed me that the prevailing opinion seems to be that all new players should always use graphics sets.


I'm one of those people who honestly has trouble understanding graphics sets.  The furniture symbols are nice, yes, but unless you are using a very high resolution font zoomed in a lot, most animals are a lot less distinguishable than the ASCII (depending on graphics set, of course).  I mean, yeah, elephants, crocodiles, etc are easy to distinguish, but all the brown quadrapeds?  Meaning most domestic animals in your fort?  All nearly identical, unless you want to squint and see the couple of pixels that distinguishes a dog face from a horse face.  It ends up largely coming down to color, or the animal's pose.  Sure, they look slightly different, and after you've k'ed it a few times you remember which is which, but how is that better than ASCII?


I also find that since they tend to be visually busy, with much less blackspace and less distinct symbols, I find them kinda tiring on the eyes, and they just blur together in a big mass of color, and I have a hard time grokking the whole screen, and I find myself squinting at individual tiles, even after I've familiarized myself with the tileset.  Solid color inside floors are especially bad for this.


The only thing that really bothers me about default ASCII is the aspect ratio.  Since it took me a while to figure out how to change tilesets, I eventually learned to layout square rooms in a non square font without counting tiles, but as soon as I figured it out I haven't looked back.  I prefer square ASCII tilesets that are small, and I like diagonal walls, so I usually use Dorten, but there are a number of similar nice tilesets, and I rather like CLA, as it solves most of ASCII's animal issues, though I don't like how it does floor tiles.


I'm not opposed to graphics sets, per se, I just think most of them try to fit too much detail into the tiles, so it can be difficult to distinguish them without inspecting color or pixels.  I think that you could draw a happy medium between the rather sparse and abstract ASCII and the busy and less distinct full graphical representations of creatures.  Perhaps a more symbolic but still meaningful style might be nice, like for a cat you could use something along the lines of this:

[ancistrus]

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.

Yes, that is quite ugly. It was one of the first things I changed in the init.txt.
[WINDOWEDX:80]
[WINDOWEDY:50]
[FULLSCREENX:800]
[FULLSCREENY:600]

[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.

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*

I am contemplating a mixture of 8x8 CGA CP437, and the two WYSE Tech 16x16 CP437 glyph sets.

For baseline graphics (the asset directory file, normally ncurses font mapping) use the sans serif from the WY-700, then for creatures use the bolder looking serif face version from the WY-700, and for creatures that need an ideogram, use the 8x8 CGA glyph, centered top, with the ideogram underneath. That leaves an 8x16 area for the ideogram. Not sure how that will look, but it's an idea.

Depending on how shittily labs go at work today, I may poke at it some. (the people in sunnyvale CA that are supposed to be maintaining the lab equiopment we are remoting into dont know what they are doing.)

[Melting Sky]

There is one standard set of characters available to everyone, with a wiki to define what every character represents. A lot of people have made different pictures to replace those, which are all different and arbitrary. It's very inconsiderate to pick one at random and just expect everybody to understand it. If you're going to post screenshots as a diagram of a neat thing you built, use the default.

I'm not sure what the most commonly used or widely understood graphic set is, but I don't think it is vanilla thus the most considerate thing to do if you have readability and politeness in mind is to take your screen shots in whatever the most common graphic interface is. My guess it's probably phoebus based tile sets but I really am not certain on this one. Perhaps we should do a poll on it and find out. Then again its probably not worth the trouble since I am guessing that even the most commonly used interface still amounts to a rather small percentage of the total player base. Just using contextual clues one can intuit pretty accurately what everything is in screenshot regardless of graphical interface. I do think the wiki should definitely be rendered consistently only in vanilla tile set when it comes to building diagrams.

[slothen]

You shouldn't write such a paper, because your audience (DF newbies) should be more focused on actually learning and playing the game.

It seems like a colossal waste of time.  Which is by definition very dwarfy, but it would be unreasonable to expect anyone (especially your target audience) to care.

Inability to "Figure out what I am looking at" is subjective, and fully bidirectional.

imo this is on the money when it comes to posting screens.  At least tilesets have the advantage of being designed to be intuitive and representative.

[GavJ]

Perhaps we should do a poll on it and find out. Then again its probably not worth the trouble since I am guessing that even the most commonly used interface still amounts to a rather small percentage of the total player base. Just using contextual clues one can intuit pretty accurately what everything is in screenshot regardless of graphical interface. I do think the wiki should definitely be rendered consistently only in vanilla tile set when it comes to building diagrams.

No need to do polls. Just look up community forts and count the people's tilesets. I did one for ya.  First one I clicked on.
(Better than polls anyway since there should be little or no bias, as they don't have to be interested in tilesets to be intrigued and click on a poll, or other tileset-based biases)
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=121407.0

animaRytak - phoebus
StLeibowitz - unknown minor default variant
insanityincarnate - default
bulborbish - default
slowpokez - unknown graphical variant (borders very different than phoebus, only has screenshots of text)
peregarrett - unknown minor default variant
chimpanzee - default
Yuli Vlasi - unknown default variant (close to default in glyphs, not in colors)
kefkacrazy - default
gentleman raptor - phoebus
sandiego - default
thegoatgod_pan - default
nonsequitorian - unknown default variant (walls and font slightly different)
gunpowdertea - default


7 Default
4 Default variant (few tiles different, or just made square, or font)
--------------
1 graphical variant (highly graphical, not phoebus)
2 Phoebus

[Swonnrr]

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.

Yes, that is quite ugly. It was one of the first things I changed in the init.txt.
[WINDOWEDX:80]
[WINDOWEDY:50]
[FULLSCREENX:800]
[FULLSCREENY:600]

Add
[FONT:curses_square_16x16.png]

[WanderingKid]

No need to do polls. Just look up community forts and count the people's tilesets. I did one for ya.  First one I clicked on.
(Better than polls anyway since there should be little or no bias, as they don't have to be interested in tilesets to be intrigued and click on a poll, or other tileset-based biases)

I would say that's a very biased polling set. 
A) It's based around community forts, which typically assume that it's a vanilla install, thus they don't know if LNP or tilesets are installed.
B) Community Forts are typically only participated in by experienced players, which is counter to the discussion here regarding newbies.
C) If you really want to do a poll using the forums for the target audience, I'd recommend banging around in the DF Questions forum, and counting screen shots.

[GavJ]

I would say that's a very biased polling set. 
A) It's based around community forts, which typically assume that it's a vanilla install, thus they don't know if LNP or tilesets are installed.
B) Community Forts are typically only participated in by experienced players, which is counter to the discussion here regarding newbies.
C) If you really want to do a poll using the forums for the target audience, I'd recommend banging around in the DF Questions forum, and counting screen shots.

Except that
A) The guy who started that community fort was using PHOEBUS, if you'll notice. And has screenshots of it in the first like, 3 sentences of the thread. So obviously not assuming vanilla install. If anything, somebody browsing quickly would assume a phoebus install, biasing it the other way, making the minority outcome for phoebus even more impressive.
B) Like I said originally and still say, nobody should care about what a person plays with. Posting is the only thing that makes any sense to standardize, if anything. And posting is not restricted to newbie experience, because players of all experiences view your threads. You want whatever the most people in the community have who will be reading your posts. Whether the poster is a newbie or not is not very reelvant.

In the special case of newbies as an audience (like for recruitment of players), I already suggested presenting multiple options to make it clear it is flexible, if they don't know better. It's a moot point which is more popular, just show a bunch of them.

[BlackFlyme]

Tilesets can cause problems if the players in a community fort are using different tilesets though.

Some tiles are different from set to set, and there can be a bit of variation within a single set from the init files or the raws alone, and when a save is passed from one tileset user to another, everything may become incomprehensible if you don't know how to change tilesets.

[GavJ]

There are other concentrated sources of screenshots out there that aren't contingent on one another. "post some funny screenshots" threads or what have you.

[m-logik]

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.

[doublestrafe]

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.

Let me know when such a thing is created.

[Melting Sky]

No need to do polls. Just look up community forts and count the people's tilesets. I did one for ya.  First one I clicked on.
(Better than polls anyway since there should be little or no bias, as they don't have to be interested in tilesets to be intrigued and click on a poll, or other tileset-based biases)
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=121407.0

animaRytak - phoebus
StLeibowitz - unknown minor default variant
insanityincarnate - default
bulborbish - default
slowpokez - unknown graphical variant (borders very different than phoebus, only has screenshots of text)
peregarrett - unknown minor default variant
chimpanzee - default
Yuli Vlasi - unknown default variant (close to default in glyphs, not in colors)
kefkacrazy - default
gentleman raptor - phoebus
sandiego - default
thegoatgod_pan - default
nonsequitorian - unknown default variant (walls and font slightly different)
gunpowdertea - default


7 Default
4 Default variant (few tiles different, or just made square, or font)
--------------
1 graphical variant (highly graphical, not phoebus)
2 Phoebus

Now do the same statistical break down using youtube videos as your source and you will find very different results. I think you see my point which is the source of your statistics is highly biased by the sub group of players it "polls." Community forts are by their very nature one of the groups of people most likely to use the default game settings since they are passing around a save. Anyway, as I said before, I think it doesn't really matter what graphic set people use or post in. A semi-competent player should be able to intuit what things are based on context alone particularly with tile sets that have sprites that are little pictures of what they are supposed to represent. 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.

[Graknorke]

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?