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Author Topic: Picking the best tileset for your screen  (Read 2058 times)

jecowa

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Picking the best tileset for your screen
« on: June 04, 2016, 11:50:52 pm »
When I see the discussed it seems like the focus is placed mostly on the horizontal width of the display. An unmodded game has to display at least 80 tiles horizontally and so screen width divided by 80 (rounded down) is often recommended as the ideal tile size.

Spoiler: max tileset size (without scaling) for a normal-sized embark (click to show/hide)
The above works great for playing on normal-sized embark. I like to play on 1-by-1 embarks, though, to help conserve FPS. If you play on a 1-by-1 embark in windowed mode, then you should probably look at the vertical size of the tileset instead. Assuming you are playing in windowed mode in Microsoft Windows with default settings, to calculate your maximum ideal vertical resolution for a 1-by-1 embark, take your screen resolution, subtract 64 from it, then take the resulting number and divide it by 50 and round down. (64 = 40 pixels for the default Windows taskbar plus 24 pixels for the vertical border height of the Dwarf Fortress window in Microsoft Windows.)
Here's the chart for ideal tile sizes for 1-by-1 embarks while playing in windowed mode:

Spoiler: max tileset size (without scaling) for a 1-by-1 embark in windowed mode (click to show/hide)
An earlier poll indicated that 77% of Dwarf Fortress users normally play in windowed mode while 23% usually play in full-screen mode. For those 23% who prefer full-screen mode and are wanting to play on a 1-by-1 embark, then these might be good tile sizes to use (just your vertical screen size divided by 50 and rounded down. It's not dependent on your OS):
Spoiler: max tileset size (without scaling) for a 1-by-1 embark in full-screen mode (click to show/hide)

Just because something is the maximum doesn't mean it's the best. If there's a tileset that's larger than your "max" size, you can still use it, it just won't fit in your screen until you resize it, and then you will have to deal with scaled-down graphics.

It's also fine to use a smaller size than your "max" size. Smaller sizes are great for when you want to see more on the screen at once, for example.
A tileset directory sorted by tilesize (Note that not all of these are necessarily up-to-date):

Spoiler: tileset directory (sorted by tile size) (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: June 05, 2016, 01:04:23 am by jecowa »
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jecowa

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Re: Picking the best tileset for your screen
« Reply #1 on: June 04, 2016, 11:52:29 pm »
Maybe this goes better in the Tileset board? I wasn't sure since it said to keep discussion in the modding area.
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