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[Mayama]

The new trees, as amazing as they are, make the game very hard to read sometimes. :/
In my personal oppinion its time to increase the sprite limit.

[smjjames]

Its fine with graphics sets though. IMO.

[Gnomeknows]

Ya, there's trees, but I think it hit it's practical limit with ascii the day the game first came out with text based graphics and no animations, that hides quite a lot right there.

[palu]

I like the ASCII, and think it looks fine.

[Aerval]

Yeah, we should realy complain more about that

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

just go to the third part application subforum and hope that twbt and dfhack are updated soon 

[Eagleon]

Ya, there's trees, but I think it hit it's practical limit with ascii the day the game first came out with text based graphics and no animations, that hides quite a lot right there.

Er, no animations? This is one of maybe like 12 ascii games that actually uses animation a great deal. Look at the waves, the way smoke and blood spreads, the hinting from flashing and background changes on creatures signifying their emotional and physical state. Try making out whether a soldier in Command and Conquer is happy or not ;(

Text graphics have an appeal for games with small tiles in that actual graphical tiles can be -much- harder to understand at higher zoom levels. Glyphs are designed to be instantly recognizable. A 16x16 rendering of a squirrel, not always so much, especially when put right next to hundreds of other creatures, plants, grass, stone, objects, etc. etc. Not saying you have to like it, just giving the reason I think it's being used and kept to so stubbornly. Most tilesets I've seen look incredibly visually messy, IMO.

I'd argue that RTSes with full 3D graphics suffer from this just as much, where units have to be very large-scale, or else act like swarms that you direct, and the viewpoint is limited to a small section of the map. You can only take in so much, apply antialiasing, increase the resolution, etc. before it becomes a decoherent blur. Basically if you're willing to learn what each character can represent in the game's internally consistant logic, the game actually has very nice graphics.

[Untelligent]

It only took me a couple minutes to get used to the ASCII trees. I see a big mess of triangles and fractions now and I'm all "yep, that's a tree."

[Gremdavel]

I feel like the trees and giant mushrooms are actually some of the coolest and easiest things to identify with the ASCII art.  The real problem comes it when things like dragons and colossi are rendered with a single tile.  But with these trees, Toady moves a little further away from single-tile representations of things, further resolving the issue of ASCII being a difficult medium to represent things.

Also, the 1/2 and 1/4 characters being used for fungus surfaces?  Brilliant.  It makes me feel as though they are the actual texture of a mushroom.

[Wimopy]

Yeah, I don't have a problem with the ASCII set either. I've been playing DF on and off since 40d, tried tilesets, and still like the default set. Trees didn't change that. Perfectly understandable. I know what I see. A character -> The race I'm seeing starts with that letter. Capital? I better check what I'm looking at just to be sure. Colour-coding helps a lot too.

Trees are only strange because they used the wall tile. A bronze wall and a tree look the same, I guess (well, depends on the tree), but I still know which is it. 1/4 is leaves/roots. Wall is trunk. Lines are branches.
L > < and such show the direction of attack/move.

I think it's all logical and easy to understand/get used to. Tilesets take it even further, it's clear what we're looking at.

The only problem I have with ASCII is that I can't feel size. Sure, capitals mean a lot, but I don't know if I'm looking at a young, smaller dragon or one that's larger than anything bar a giant sperm whale.

[Stalker]

I see no problem with the ascii, It looks fine to me, maybe you are too used to texture packs?

[Rafal99]

I have no problems with ASCII trees either.
Colorful tree tops look beautiful in my opinion. And the use of 1/4 tile for leaves and roots is great choice.
The only problem I can see is that trunk indeed looks like walls, but it is not a big problem because you usually know where you built walls and where the trees are.

[RealFear]

Even though I use tile-sets as much as possible, I don't think the ASCII is hindering.
The only problems I have EVER had with it is that it's slower to identify things, and the fact that there's only one tile for each civ race (as apposed to the different sprites for each type of worker in a graphic tileset).

Though these couldn't even be considered frustrating.

[de5me7]

I don't have an issue with the trees at all. I'd say some of the text interfaces could do some work, but that's not really an ascii issue.

[Angle]

ASCII IS BEAUTIFUL! KILL THE UNBELEIVERS!

Yeah no, I like ASCII. Leave my ASCII alone~

[Robsoie]

The only problem I have with ASCII is that I can't feel size. Sure, capitals mean a lot, but I don't know if I'm looking at a young, smaller dragon or one that's larger than anything bar a giant sperm whale.

Hopefully now that trees are multi-tiles we will get multi-tiles creatures too, it would do more justice to those bronze colossi, big dragons , giant elephants, titans or undead giant sperm whales than the little ascii glyph that is not bigger than the one used for many time much smaller creatures.

In the excellent X@COM , some creatures are multi tiles, some are even bigger than that, and it render amazingly in ASCII at making you feel the power and gigantism of those things.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=93822.0

This is really something that would improve a lot the creature sense of scale in DF while keeping the ASCII