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[Dibujor]

I've been pretty busy with work and using my little spare time to try the map tiles.

So far results have been less than satisfactory, but I've learned a few things along the way (by the way, my previous post is incomplete, there are more tiles for the map. I'll post a complete list once I have all this sorted out to not mess with your brains).

Now, after some tries I've decided the "reailistic" approach is not gonna work for the map tiles. The map simple doesn't read well. You can see one of my first tries HERE (pretty big image so follow the link). As you can see, although pretty big, the map is really "busy".

After some more tries I decided to focus primarily on the terrain first, the location tiles are easier. You have one of my last tries HERE.

It.just.doesn't.work

So I've decided a few things:

• I'm going to take a more simpler approach for the map. More painterly one (you can see some of that in the second image low mountains). E.G Spacefox map is easily readable and simple, something like that. After all, maps are always a simpler representation of real landmarks so no clash with the "Style" of the tileset. I considered briefly going for kinda "ink drawing" map. The type you can see in every fantasy book, but DF colors the tiles anyways, and there's no text to mark places.
• I'll go back to first image grass, more subtle and less "in your face". I wanted to easily tell apart "grassy" terrain by the type of grass but I can't understan how and why DF uses tiles and colors (you have more or less two tiles for every type of terrain), it seems random (You can see grey forests in the second image), I know it isn't but can't get the pattern.I've spent quite some time with this wiki page to see how DF groups terrain tiles to show the different types.
• Trees more or less work, I plan to include under the tree a lighter version of the grass terrain and a black border for the tree (I'll do the same with other elemets such as shrubs, rocks, etc). That way they'll show better (e.g shrublands in second image)
• Tundra has to be less subtle so you can separate it better from glacier
• Volcano can't have a volcano tile. It shares tile with the peak so unless you want a lot of fake volcanos there...

In general a lot of those tiles will change (rock in rocky wastelands, willow tree, mountains...) but I wanted to share my slow progress and failed attempts so as not to give the impression that I abandoned this tileset.


P.S.- I actually learned that if you leave the "Print" mode as TWBT you have to load the map tiles into the FONT_TEXT in order to see the map with those tiles (bad if you want to use a smaller font). If you use any other method (Standard, 2D...) you can use GRAPHIC_FONT. Either way you have to change it again once you don't need the map anymore

[Max™]

You can add the TWBT printmode to this: https://github.com/lethosor/dfhack-scripts/blob/a4fd08371f178f79b3076041b1f48457113cc7f7/settings-manager.lua which lets you swap them easier, and yeah the second one does look better... though I kinda like the busier mountains in the first one too.

[LeoCean]

Does it allow you switch it while ingame? Through the dfhack console?

TWBT_LEGACY is no longer supported? It should be but I have no clue. That is the regular ol tileset graphics for the map instead of text. There's other difference to though, soit's not recommended to play with it. As some overrides don't function with it.

[Max™]

I don't know what it does about the tileset but it does let you change the settings, I could swear it was in standard dfhack.

I changed the print_modes lines to this:

Code: [Select]

-- Used in PRINT_MODE
local print_modes = {
    {'2D', '2D (default)'}, {'2DSW', '2DSW'}, {'2DASYNC', '2DASYNC'}, {'TWBT', 'TWBT'},
    {'STANDARD', 'STANDARD (OpenGL)'}, {'PROMPT', 'Prompt (STANDARD/2D)'}, {'TWBT_LEGACY', '
TWBT_LEGACY'},
    {'ACCUM_BUFFER', 'ACCUM_BUFFER'}, {'FRAME_BUFFER', 'FRAME_BUFFER'}, {'VBO', 'VBO'}
}
It works properly but you do have to shut down/restart to reactivate it. Still faster than going in and grabbing the file/editing it/rebooting/etc.

[Boltgun]

It looks alright, the trees and mountains of the first image can use a background to blend better and the river tiles may be expanded to take more of its square space.

However, if you can enforce a sepia background on everything, making an ink styled map would be even better.

Either way, I am eager to see a 32x tileset so I can put my own race in it.

[Dibujor]

TWBT_LEGACY is no longer supported? It should be but I have no clue. That is the regular ol tileset graphics for the map instead of text. There's other difference to though, soit's not recommended to play with it. As some overrides don't function with it.

Yeah, it's supported. That's what I'm using right now to test the tiles. At least lets you load the map on the graphic_font so you don't have the tiles overriding the text.

It looks alright, the trees and mountains of the first image can use a background to blend better and the river tiles may be expanded to take more of its square space.

However, if you can enforce a sepia background on everything, making an ink styled map would be even better.

Either way, I am eager to see a 32x tileset so I can put my own race in it.

That's one of the changes I'm doing, adding background to the object tiles so they blend better, at least the trees. The rivers, in that image you see the original ascii ones. I didn't change them there

About the "ink" tiles, yup, having a sepia background could do for a good "fantasy style" map. But I don't think is possible or even if it were, I don't think is going to happen. And as it is right now.... let's say that an ink map is... less than pretty (and quite useless). You can take a look at my test HERE. That's a horrible 15 minutes tileset, but enough for me to get the feeling for it.

[Button]

TWBT_LEGACY is no longer supported? It should be but I have no clue. That is the regular ol tileset graphics for the map instead of text. There's other difference to though, soit's not recommended to play with it. As some overrides don't function with it.

Yeah, it's supported. That's what I'm using right now to test the tiles. At least lets you load the map on the graphic_font so you don't have the tiles overriding the text.

It looks alright, the trees and mountains of the first image can use a background to blend better and the river tiles may be expanded to take more of its square space.

However, if you can enforce a sepia background on everything, making an ink styled map would be even better.

Either way, I am eager to see a 32x tileset so I can put my own race in it.

That's one of the changes I'm doing, adding background to the object tiles so they blend better, at least the trees. The rivers, in that image you see the original ascii ones. I didn't change them there

About the "ink" tiles, yup, having a sepia background could do for a good "fantasy style" map. But I don't think is possible or even if it were, I don't think is going to happen. And as it is right now.... let's say that an ink map is... less than pretty (and quite useless). You can take a look at my test HERE. That's a horrible 15 minutes tileset, but enough for me to get the feeling for it.

Really? I love the second attempt there! It feels like a map that someone in-game drew on a slate. A little extension of the graphics to the east and west, so that tiles of the same type blend together, and that would be great.

It's not really the style you're going for here, true, but it would be a fun concept for a tileset in itself!

[Max™]

I am madder than hell that your "horrible 15 minute" tileset looks so much better than crap I worked on forever trying to get rounded corners of walls to show up with the right smoothness.

[Dirst]

Wouldn't a sepia style require hot-swapping the color scheme so that the map looks parchment-y?  Basically, make one black background and the other 15 an identical parchment color and use that as your primary map background... then include color in the graphic font itself to represent the icons.  Maps of that sort tend to only use one or two colors anyway.

You lose the color-text information on the embark screen, but I think that'd be an acceptable loss.

[Boltgun]

It makes me realize that it would be hard to distinguish an island in the sea as the only indicator would be the mountain, unless you use different tones of sepia.

[Dirst]

It makes me realize that it would be hard to distinguish an island in the sea as the only indicator would be the mountain, unless you use different tones of sepia.

It'd be perfectly acceptable to have the ocean tiles completely blank, which would make the islands stand out just fine.  The inability to draw a shoreline, however, is going to make it hard to pull off this style.

A completely different approach would be to go for a more zoomed-out map that has 8x8 tiles to make things look smoother.

[Dibujor]

Wouldn't a sepia style require hot-swapping the color scheme so that the map looks parchment-y?  Basically, make one black background and the other 15 an identical parchment color and use that as your primary map background... then include color in the graphic font itself to represent the icons.  Maps of that sort tend to only use one or two colors anyway.

You lose the color-text information on the embark screen, but I think that'd be an acceptable loss.

I think you can't color-code the font itself because there's no direct correlation between tile and color. I mean, grasslands aren't always green, sand deserts aren't always yellow and son on. I think there are some har coded colors, like red and purple for volcanos and evil (and white for good) but that's all the information wou'll get with that approach. 

That doesn't mean that isn't a viable option (I didn't even think of that, changing all the colors to sepia so the background was like that). It depends what you want the map for. That could make for an interesting image, though it wouldn't be very useful in game at first glance. But many people use the search function and the info text to look for a viable location for embark so....

I'm now making the "painted" version but drawing simple icons for the "ink" version shouldn't take too much time. If there's demand for it I'll try in the future.

It makes me realize that it would be hard to distinguish an island in the sea as the only indicator would be the mountain, unless you use different tones of sepia.

You could note the only not-water icon in the middle of the sea, but you have to find it. It would be more difficult, yeah. Unless you have the ocean as black tiles as Dirst said, then all the sepia tiles would be land.

It makes me realize that it would be hard to distinguish an island in the sea as the only indicator would be the mountain, unless you use different tones of sepia.

It'd be perfectly acceptable to have the ocean tiles completely blank, which would make the islands stand out just fine.  The inability to draw a shoreline, however, is going to make it hard to pull off this style.

A completely different approach would be to go for a more zoomed-out map that has 8x8 tiles to make things look smoother.

I'm afraid I don't get it. 8x8 tiles to make things look smoother?

[Dirst]

It makes me realize that it would be hard to distinguish an island in the sea as the only indicator would be the mountain, unless you use different tones of sepia.

It'd be perfectly acceptable to have the ocean tiles completely blank, which would make the islands stand out just fine.  The inability to draw a shoreline, however, is going to make it hard to pull off this style.

A completely different approach would be to go for a more zoomed-out map that has 8x8 tiles to make things look smoother.

I'm afraid I don't get it. 8x8 tiles to make things look smoother?

Yeah, that wasn't phrased very well.  The idea being to use a tiny font so that TWBT puts a whole lot of tiles into the overworld map.  I'm not sure how to convince the game to draw a good-sized map with a zillion tiny tiles rather than just a tiny map.

[oriramikad]

About the "ink" tiles, yup, having a sepia background could do for a good "fantasy style" map. But I don't think is possible or even if it were, I don't think is going to happen. And as it is right now.... let's say that an ink map is... less than pretty (and quite useless). You can take a look at my test HERE. That's a horrible 15 minutes tileset, but enough for me to get the feeling for it.

Can I have the tiles for that to play around with? Cuz that's purty. *drools*

[Dibujor]

  You ended up "forcing" me to try again that "Ink map" thing.

HERE You can see a crop of the result, this time with a proper sepia background (BIG images so I only post the links). And HERE you can see the screen for selecting an embark location with world, regional and local views. Boltgun, as you can see, it's pretty easy to see islands on the sea

There's a lot of room for improvement there, I used the same crappy tileset I made before, and I used just three tones of sepia (4 if you count the brown I used for the "black"), 2 for the green and light green (as there's a lot of that in the world creation) and a third for everything else. I could give a slightly different tone of sepia for every color so you'll have a more "parched" map. The tileset isn't even finished, there are some tiles that I didn't draw because I didn't know what they were used for at the time, now I do. The red you can see on some tiles is on the actual tiles. I marked that on the tileset so I could easily identify them to know what they were used for.

The downside to this.... you can't actually see what you're selecting when on the game menus, just have to count key presses to know if you're selecting "play" "create new world" and so on. And it seems you lose the ability to find volcanoes and evil places and such at first glance. I thought red and purple were hard coded but it doesn't seem so (look at the world map), so if you don't use the search function for embark, this is pretty but not that useful.

Here you can download the COMPLETE WORLD MAP that, if I may say so myself, looks gorgeous . Infinitely better than I thought.

Limitations are serious though and this isn't really usable for the "non hardcore" DF players in the sense that I don't think the advantages of the "good lookings" overweight the disadvantages of having to change color palettes and tilesets for many. It would be fantastic if that could be automated. Some settings in LNP or something that allow you to select color and tileset for the map only and then load another for game play. I know nothing about such matters though so I don't know if that's even remotely possible or worth the effort.

Anyway, I'm now interested enough to make a proper drawn tileset in this style, shouldn't take much.