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[Pvt. Pirate]

I am a fairly newborn Dorf, but i've seen quite some tilesets and Graphicsets and i was wondering if i could just use existing 28x36 graphics and make my own graphicset.

what's there to be done?
what do i need to keep in mind?
can i just use an existing set and resize adn replace the tiles?

the graphics i'd use come from the game "Blades of Exile" and they made it OpenSource:

...
Therefore, we have released the source code (along with all necessary support files, graphics files, sound effects, etc.) for the Windows and Macintosh versions of Blades of Exile to the world. Do what you want with it (within the sensible legal guidelines described in the license), and have fun.

This code is released under the Common Public License. This means, that, with a few modest limitations, you can modify this code, create your own version of Blades of Exile, and share it with the world. Before you do this, however, be sure to read the license. You should know what your rights and responsibilities are. If you release a buggy program that hurts other peoples' machines, we aren't legally responsible. You are.
...

for some screenshots: http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/blades/BOEshots.html

[NW_Kohaku]

Keep in mind that tileset is meant for displaying exactly what is in the image.  DF uses filtering by color, so a white stone floor will look exactly like the floor you have, but a brown stone floor will have all its blue muted out, as well as half its red and green. 

Plus, DF makes heavy use of transparency... which those tiles don't have.

Also, keep in mind that for a tileset that large, you'd need a minimum screen width of 2240 pixels.

[Dirst]

The character sprites seem to have transparency, but anything intended for terrain will need a lot of trial and error to color correctly.

I'd recommend straight up grayscale to start, then dab color back in where it seems appropriate.

[Pvt. Pirate]

thanks
i don't mind having to try a lot and i have some experience in photoshop, so i guess i can handle that.
i thought i could turn many if not most of those tiles into greyscales.
so what you mean is the game uses the image and changes its color according to the material the tile is made of?
then if i take a "wall with door", turn it into pure greyscale (desaturate), cut out the metal hinges from the original and paste them above the greyscale, would they be full color or would the hinges be recolored?
when it comes to coloring things myself, i'd need advice because of my https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Red.E2.80.93green_color_blindness

is it possible to add different tiles to smoothed natural walls and constructed walls?

i usually zoom in and out depending on how much area of the fortress i need to see or how much detail i need to recognize.
i currently only have a 1280x1024 (5:4) LCD-Screen

[CLA]

thanks
i don't mind having to try a lot and i have some experience in photoshop, so i guess i can handle that.
i thought i could turn many if not most of those tiles into greyscales.
so what you mean is the game uses the image and changes its color according to the material the tile is made of?
then if i take a "wall with door", turn it into pure greyscale (desaturate), cut out the metal hinges from the original and paste them above the greyscale, would they be full color or would the hinges be recolored?
when it comes to coloring things myself, i'd need advice because of my https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Red.E2.80.93green_color_blindness

is it possible to add different tiles to smoothed natural walls and constructed walls?

i usually zoom in and out depending on how much area of the fortress i need to see or how much detail i need to recognize.
i currently only have a 1280x1024 (5:4) LCD-Screen

see
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Graphics
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tilesets

and more precisely
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Color

The latter article should answer some of your questions, though it's still a bit incomplete. The former two should give you a general overview with the "tileset" article showing you lists of tiles and their meaning (including which you can change and which you can't).

is it possible to add different tiles to smoothed natural walls and constructed walls?

No.

As for color blindness, colors are set separately from the tileset, and you can change them to whatever you want. There are already a few color schemes optimized for people with one or another form of color blindness you might want to use.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i am using the red-green one and it works great.
as for the tiles, i am getting confused, but i'll figure it out.

with TWBT, the tiles and the font are separate, aren't they?
so if i use a TWBT-tileset, it should be much easier.

[NW_Kohaku]

Making a TwbT tileset's actually a bit more work, since you need to make more tiles...

Honestly, I always found it easier to just hand-draw tiles than to try repurposing old ones.

But anyway, the short of it is that color filters what is on your tile.  This is why tiles are generally white with some gray shading - a blue color will turn off all red and green, leaving only the blue aspects of the color, so if you have a patch of the tile that is red or green, that patch of the tile will appear black, instead. 

You also want transparency, because many tiles, when printed in the game, use the transparency layer as a second color.  For example, in the basic Curses tileset, a standard dog is a brown "d" on a black (transparent) background, a war dog is a gray "d" on a black background, and a dead dog is a brown or gray "d" on a dark red background. The transparent section turns dark red upon death. 

Many more recent tilesets take full advantage of this - for example, Phoebus recolors the bushes in the raws so that a harvestable shrub uses a "bush" tile with (opaque) black on the edges, and transparent "berry" sections. Then, most forageables have a color of green for the primary color (that the actual tile gets colored) and purple or whatever the berry's color is for the secondary color (which is where the transparency goes).

Download Phoebus's tileset, or others, and put the "art" file in GIMP or Photoshop where you can see the layers, and test it out in action.  Just create a new layer under the main layer, and set that to whatever your "secondary" color will be, then alter the "main" layer to be whatever colors the actual material will be.

Again, keep in mind that material tends to determine the color of tiles.  Some stone is white, some is brown, most is light or dark gray, and you occasionally have large swaths of cyan microcline in your dining hall.

Finally, graphics for creatures is totally separate, and does not have any of the filter rules apply, so you can have full-color images for dwarves or dogs or keas or whatever.

[utkonos]

Well, making a tileset isn't too hard, making tileset+all overrides takes quite some time, making tileset+overrides+graphics for creatures takes...a lot of time. I'm not a fast drawing guy, but for me tileset took couple of weeks to do, overrides took about month or 2 and graphics took about 7 months of my free time.

[Max™]

For what it's worth on the nonSquare side of things, without the game scaling them down, 24x36 fits a 1920x1080 screen, 16x24 fits a 1366x768 screen, 32x48 fits a 2560x1440 screen, and the largest I've done is 36x54 which stretches up to 2880x1620. While a 48x72 set would fit a 3840x2160 screen.

[NW_Kohaku]

Err... 16xwhatever gets a width of 1280 (which was a common max screen width before widescreens became popular), because it's 80 tiles wide as a default. (16x16 produces 1280x480, for example, which would be a full screen width and likely only a third of the screen in height.) You can now stretch the border, though, so you can use a tile size somewhat larger than your monitor if you so choose.

[Max™]

True, but 17xwhatever doesn't fix as cleanly as a 16x set.

[Pvt. Pirate]

you're all somewhat right.
1. it would be a lot easier to get a non TWBT tilest only thing going.
2. without TWBT, you can only see quite the tinyest amount of the map if using a big tilest.
3. with TWBT, there's much more stuff to be changed thatn without it.

TWBT isnt stable at 42.06 s oi'll just keep playing with the current available packs.
if it ever seems to be stable, i pick up this thing again and make my own tilest+graphicset.

[Rogue Yun]

True, but 17xwhatever doesn't fix as cleanly as a 16x set.

I'm not sure why you brought up the 17xwhatever, but there is an upside to odd sized tilesets. They make beautiful diagonals without having to go asymmetrical.

I hope you don't hold me responsible for the following... I was temporarily insane.

Here is an example of a 17x17

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And good luck Pvt. Pirate! I enjoyed playing Exile: Escape from the pit in my youth. Just take what you know and mess around and I'm sure you will know more about what you want to do by the time you are done.

[Max™]

True, but 17xwhatever doesn't fix as cleanly as a 16x set.

I'm not sure why you brought up the 17xwhatever, but there is an upside to odd sized tilesets. They make beautiful diagonals without having to go asymmetrical.

In response to NW Kohaku pointing out that 16x24 isn't technically the native fit for 1366x768 (which is still pretty much the standard for laptops for some reason) since it's more like 17x25 but eh.

I hope you don't hold me responsible for the following... I was temporarily insane.

Here is an example of a 17x17

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ah, I hadn't even thought about doing diagonals for the river tiles, I probably should though.

Trying to get 24x36 diagonal walls to work is maddening btw, because the directly connected points that work aren't 45 degree angles so you get weird effects if they aren't perfectly anti-aliased and I ain't got the art skills to manage that. Ended up doing the 45 degree portions linking to shortened vertical-connections on the relevant tiles.

[NW_Kohaku]

If you are using TwbT, though, you bypass pretty much the only reason anyone would want to use non-square tiles: To make text not seem "squished" vertically to fit into a square tile.

TwbT text is a different tileset, so you're making what is supposed to be equidistant tile lengths different apparent lengths (and screwing up diagonals) without it's only real benefit. 

TwbT is spectacularly great when it works, it's just that it's really unreliable right now.