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[Dibujor]

Well, yeah, if that's an option I agree with DragonDePlatino. The game does a terrible job coloring the buildings  on its own. For the sake of clarity the second and third options look the best. Certainly you lose the visual hint of what material you used for constructing the workshops but....

[mifki]

Why, you don't lose anything, material colour is still applied to the entire building.
Ideally, I'd like it to apply material colours only to parts of the image, but don't know how to specify this parts. I don't like butcher's shop in #2, it sort of doesn't make sense that _everything_ in a workshop got colour of the material.

[DragonDePlatino]

The problem with letting the game colorize things is that they loose their color identity. If you have a diverse image with lots of colors and the game colorizes it, then it becomes almost a monochrome version of the material color. It's not really a problem with TWBT, it's just colorizing things looks much better on pure-white ASCII than hand-drawn graphics. Material colors are really important for things like armor and weapons, but not very useful for workshops. Personally, I think there should be an option to disable the colorization for workshops so that they look better.

Hah, NewFg and NewBg were a requested feature as well, it's used when you have a colourful image for a tile and want to retain its colours instead of applying material colours.

I don't do that but I could see how it's useful. It seems like a bit of a cop-out to make all of your items the same color, though.

Remember when I said that? I feel very differently about workshops.

[sic8]

Is it possible to apply the colouring to only the greyscale portion of a texture? Any pixel with RGB values that are equal get colored and everything else is untouched. Could allow, for example, a sword hilt that is always brown and just the blade changes colour with materials.

[mifki]

Material colors are really important for things like armor and weapons, but not very useful for workshops.

I partly agree with this, but on the other hand, this complexity is one of the unique DF features. Again, for example, it's players' responsibility to build several workshops in a room using the same materials if they want them to look the same. If we don't colour workshops, it feels like losing some of the game uniqueness and making it simpler. Of course, it can be configurable as you suggest, though.

Is it possible to apply the colouring to only the greyscale portion of a texture? Any pixel with RGB values that are equal get colored and everything else is untouched. Could allow, for example, a sword hilt that is always brown and just the blade changes colour with materials.

I can try.

[Dibujor]

Why, you don't lose anything, material colour is still applied to the entire building.
Ideally, I'd like it to apply material colours only to parts of the image, but don't know how to specify this parts. I don't like butcher's shop in #2, it sort of doesn't make sense that _everything_ in a workshop got colour of the material.

Oh, I think that, again,  I misunderstood what I was seeing.  Thought the first example was letting  the game colorize the workshop and that it applied the colors of the materials  used for construction (as I thought this is standard behavior).  And the second was using the same color for all the building, a color I thought YOU selected.  Now I see is the same color of the walls surrounding it and I don't like the butchers on #2 also.  So how the game decides the colors used in #1 then?

The thing is in both ways you lose details (the butcher is almost unrecognizable in #2). Granted you can sort of make up for this in the drawing if that's the limitation, bumping contrast and so on.

Ideally it would be fantastical using color of the materials for things with  no hue (table, pool, etc, furniture  basically ) and maintaining the original colors  where present. 

But reading you it seems pretty difficult so perhaps the best compromise here would be maintaining the workshops as drawn if possible? Using a white foreground color in game?  If at all possible that is.

[mifki]

So how the game decides the colors used in #1 then?

Some tiles get predefined colours and some get material colour. This is hardcoded so is not the best option for custom images of course.

[Dibujor]

He, I got ninja'd while writing my post.  I agree with the sentiment of stopping the game from colorizing the workshops takes away part of what makes df so great, and some fun for many (struggling to make all things from the same material to look good).   But on the other hand you lose clarity and readability when you get into "realistic" graphics for the workshops. Is a no win  situation, you have one thing or the other.

Unless you can do that, it would be the ideal situation IMHO.

 Using whatever method you define to colorize some parts and let the others untouched.  In my examples it would use the material colors on everything but the bits I colorized myself, best of both worlds

[Button]

You could have the material color the floor of the workshop, and none of the fluff?

[Dirst]

There are a couple of ways that it could be handled, but I don't know which is more technically complex.

1. Shade the material color on just the grayscale pixels (r=g=b).  One gotcha is that some things have more than one material (the anvil of a forge, the rope and mechanism of a well, etc.).  Another is how to deal with transparency.  I'm a fan of using the alpha channel because you can mix any color on top of it, but another alternative to treat all shades of magenta (r=b, g=0) as transparent with darker shades "casting a shadow."

2. Include completely different images with declared color sources, and this time the alpha channel seems like the only reasonable way to go for transparency.  The "as-is" source doesn't color it at all, one can be colored by the first material, etc.

It's probably not too critical how background colors are handled for workshops, but it should be consistent with how background colors are handled for creatures (alpha channels or whathaveyou).  Creature backgrounds are used to convey status information like underwater or attacking.  Shading the floor with a garish status color seems perfectly reasonable to me, just need to change the default black background to white so things combine properly.

FYI, as far as I can tell building a workshop does not affect the floor under it.  For example, an outdoor workshop can have grass under it.

[mifki]

Yeah, I've heard these suggestions from you before, I just need to find a time to implement them (this require figuring out how to do that in OpenGL with less performance impact) and we'll see what works better.

[Dirst]

Sorry didn't want to turn this into the TWBT thread, was just expanding on what Dibujor and Button said.  I really don't know which of those would perform better, or if they're both lethal to FPS.

It is nice to see so much interest in high-resolution graphics and not taking the game's UI limitations laying down.

[Dibujor]

Oh, I don't mind technical discussions here. I created this thread to ask the main question in the title, but also to learn and to ask my own technical questions. So if anything of what is talked here serves "the greater good" I don't mind it at all so, don't worry.

I don't know how this can be implemented, although I like it, my knowledge about coding is minimal and mostly centered around html and css (yeah, I know, I know, that's not coding  ) so things I maybe find simple could be stupidly complicated and viceversa. I can only give my perspective as a graphics creator.

I don't know if it's possible at all to "read" the saturation of a pixel. To me, as I draw this I mentally think of any pixel with no saturation at all (greyscale) as getting the materials from the game and any pixel with saturation (colored) as "I'd like this to be as is". Then, if you want something to be gray, just give that grey a light shade of blue or any color. So, saturation==0 gets materials, saturation =/=0 remains as is.

I know there are a lot of other things involved so I'm usually hesitant to say things out loud to not embarrass myself XD

[Dibujor]

I've made couple more workshops, just to keep on trying this. I've looked at the wiki and tried to draw over the same tiles the wiki shows as constructed, strangely no all the constructed ones are impassable. Speaking of which, I though that to give another visual hint I could incorporate into the design something to show the impassable tiles, and, at the same time recognize the workshop (as if looking at the graphics wouldn't be enough...)

Spoiler: Dyer and Magma forge NO floor (click to show/hide)

 

Spoiler: Dyer and Magma forge w/floor (click to show/hide)

 

Spoiler:  Some floors to try out (click to show/hide)

   

I'm not entirely convinced with the floors though, but whatever

[mifki]

Images are great, as usual, the idea how to show impassable tiles is so nice. I don't like the border on the last two floors, though. When other elements are placed on top of border it looks weird.