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[scamtank]

I suppose with the graphics he means something like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fuzzy, fuzzy edges. I suppose it's a natural consequence of reconciling tiles that are nowhere near the same size. (10x10 vs 16x16)

It still feels a little unstable, though. Big saves crash on unpause with this on.

[mifki]

Well, if "graphics" and "text" tilesets have different sizes then text tiles will be resized and look not perfect. But it's a question of choosing correct tilesets only, isn't it? Unfortunately there are not many good fonts where no characters replaced with graphics to choose from though.

As for crashes, I haven't experienced any so far, I'll try loading different saves, but possibly it depends on something else and not the save size.

[Quietust]

TTF rendering ... currently has problems with ... not being used on some screens (I wonder why) and in text output by dfhack plugins.

Truetype can only be used on viewscreens which Toady has actually coded to work with TrueType - most notably, the "text viewer" (used for thoughts/preferences, item descriptions, in-game help, etc.) does not support TrueType.

Similarly, the reason DFHack doesn't use TrueType is because it doesn't support it, and the reason we don't support it is because it's too damn buggy.

[Meph]

I had a discussion with lxnt, baughn and Toady, and later on another with Taffer, Baughn and Toady. Baughn would like to update the graphics significantly, but cant work without source access. Toady understands this, but wont give this access. (which is perfectly within his right to do)

So a graphic engine update is most likely not going to happen any time soon.

[fricy]

@warmist: What I meant is a modularized renderer library (.dll/.so) that can be modified/recomplied/whatever without touching the main DF engine, so in essence DF would remain closed source, but at the same time partly open. I think this is what lnxt proposed almost 2 years ago:

/snip
The basic idea is to get rid of any platform-dependent code in the main executable and to make the rendeder live in .dll on win32 while at it. There are five interfaces - musicsound, textures (creature graphics index), keyboard (keybindings, ...), platform (read/write/create/delete files, messageboxes, ...) and the renderer (which isn't finalized yet).
First stage would be a (fully functional, of course) libgraphics.so which instead of containing all the PRINT_MODE and musicsound implementations, will dynamically load them.
After that I hope to persuade Toady to extract whatever code uses the sdl12 calls and is still not in g_src, so that executable itself will not in any way depend on third-party libraries. With some win32-specific glue code and recompilation of the game for win32 using my work, we will at last have means to swap around renderers in win32 too.

...but as Meph commented Toady is against this, so I'll just shut my mouth.

@scamtank: Yepp, and yepp. Fuzzy edges, that we can't do anything for at the moment, just thought to mention it. Finding same size text and graphics tilesets is a bit hard at the moment, but I expect the artists to catch up with it once we get some momentum. This effectively doubles the available tiles, which is IMHO the biggest advancement since foreground/background/transparency tricks were invented.

And in other news I postponed pushing out the new Macnewbie as I ran into some unexpected crashes that may or may not be related to the plugin. I'm 99% that it's something else, but'll get back to you once I have a bit time to figure it out. I suspect the GL renderer, but it's a mystery as I was testing for hours yesterday without problems, and then it started crashing 9 times out of 10 when I decided it was stable enough. Frustrating.   

[Meph]

The two tilesets can be different sizes? Like a 12x font tileset and a 32x graphical set? That would indeed make it a lot more useful.

Has anyone tried running this and Rendermax at the same time?

[mifki]

@Meph: No, if I understood your question right. Tiles will be resized to the same size (ie. text tiles will be resized to match main tile set). Although with some effort something may be possible.

Originally I was going to make bigger modifications to rendering, one thing would be to implement real background+foreground rendering, so that floor tile with its material/color is rendered first and then object is rendered on top with its own material, not obscuring the floor completely.

But now at least there's no need for these bg/fg tricks, so that tileset creation should be easier. Also I was thinking that it may be possible to patch tile numbers somewhere in memory to remap objects using the same tile to different tiles as we now can use all letter/number tiles for something else. If it's not possible to statically remap objects, I can do that dynamically in the plugin, although it may be slow, need to check.

@fricy: you're on OS X so it's trivial to copy and email me crash log(s) to check.

[Meph]

Its certainly exciting to see someone heavily altering graphics.

And yes, you understood my question correctly.

[mifki]

Since any significant changes to rendering would require special tilesets/raws to make use of them, it's better to discuss what effects we want to achieve so that code is not written that nobody's going to use.

I quickly tried rendermax with my plugin now and it crashes, partly because of how I override rendering methods, as Warmist noticed before. I'll look into this later.

[Meph]

So what Raws/Pngs do you need? I'd be happy to help. A grapgical tileset that has all letters replaced with icons (for plants or workshops) and a same sized tileset for the text? (any ascii tileset would do, I'd say)

Because that I could do in a few hours. Althouth I wont have access to my Pc for a week at least,.but I will let you know when I am available again.

[mifki]

No that's not quite what I meant. I can modify tileset/raws myself for testing/demo of course. But if I make changes to rendering that only I alone find useful and no tile set authors will support (eg. if it will require creating more tiles for separate objects), that's not too good. Anyway for now I don't need anything because I haven't even tried yet to make modifications I'm thinking about.

[Meph]

But if you want suggestions, you need to tell people about possible uses.

For example all weapons and ammo shares one tile. It would be great, if the plugin would check the item type, and use different tiles for ammo or weapons. Checking for the sub-type would be even better, that way swords could look differently from axes, and shirts dont look like gloves that dont look like breastplates.

So my suggestion would be to read out the itemtype and allow different tiles for Item:Subtype. But I dont know if this is a valid suggestion or impossible.

[Vattic]

PTW.

This looks really interesting.

[fricy]

@fricy: you're on OS X so it's trivial to copy and email me crash log(s) to check.

I think I figured it out: Somehow the dfhack.init causes some instability on my system. It's not a specific setting, but the order of the settings in the init file. I was playing around with:

Code: [Select]

fix/cloth-stockpile enable
fix/feeding-timers enable
fix/growthbug enableand wanted to change the order, to put them close to each other and the game started crashing right after launching the game before your plugin kicks in.
The strange thing is that it doesn't crash every time, once-twice out of 10 launches it loads correctly. A few months ago I had the same problem with falconne's hotkeys plugin, and I couldn't find the cause at that time, others didn't see the crashes. Maybe it's only something with my mac, or only on 10.7.5. But it's not the twbt plugin, so at least we have that.
If you want to investigate I have uploaded the inits to dropbox for testing.

[Vherid]

Oh my