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[phillosopher]

So this is coming from someone that has no clue, obviously, but what is the difference between the 16px, 24px, and 32px tiles? I mean I know it is pixel size, but what is the practical application here? Does it work better for certain size monitors or the like? Or can they be run on any size and be fine? I'm running a standard 1080p monitor and just wondering if a 32px set might not work, as it seems like it might be for the higher res monitors, but I don't know.

Thanks for any education you can give this hairless ape

[Godlysockpuppet]

So this is coming from someone that has no clue, obviously, but what is the difference between the 16px, 24px, and 32px tiles? I mean I know it is pixel size, but what is the practical application here? Does it work better for certain size monitors or the like? Or can they be run on any size and be fine? I'm running a standard 1080p monitor and just wondering if a 32px set might not work, as it seems like it might be for the higher res monitors, but I don't know.

Thanks for any education you can give this hairless ape

Well the more pixels used the larger the images, so the lower the resolution. Inversely, with a good enough monitor and small enough tileset (like an 8x8) you can almost fit a whole embark area onscreen at once.

[Taffer]

The difference is just how small or how large tiles look on the screen. Tiny sizes are good for showing you most (or all) of an embark at once, which is why I prefer them. Monitors with resolutions significantly higher than 1920x1080 will not display small tilesets well.

Some claim that certain tileset sizes work better than others for different screens, but that's inconsequential. 16x16 doesn't evenly fit onto a 1920x1080 screen, for example (1080/16=67.5), but Dwarf Fortress will just fill the remaining space with black. My tilesets don't evenly divide into my 1330x768 laptop screen, and I've never noticed or cared about the extra millimetre of black space.

How big (physically) is your monitor, and how far away are you sitting from it? My computer monitor and my large television are both 1920x1080, but I use my 10x10 sets for the former and my 20x20 sets for the latter. Are you trying to play adventure mode and want to pay careful attention to what's happening with your character, or do you just want to build a fort than relax and watch things play out?

Just use what looks best to you. If it's too zoomed then find something smaller. If it's too zoomed out for you, find something larger.

[burned]

For better understanding, resizing the game window was NOT possible prior to SDL. While one no longer has to calculate gridsize for a character tileset they are using (thanks to the SDL version) it can produce some questionable results if you don't choose a character tileset size that was meant for the game resolution you intend to use (e.g. with the minimum gridsize of 80x25 a 32x32 pixel set needs a minimum resolution of 2560x800).

The default settings add black space if your set was designed for a lower resolution than the resolution you are using or squishes the tiles down if it was designed for a larger resolution. I believe the ugly "zooming" people experience is a side effect of this visual compromise.

Gridsize still matters if you want the character tileset to display as intended; resizing the the window via the SDL version alters that gridsize.

As Taffer mentioned and without the need to worry about gridsize at all because of the SDL version, what character tileset size you want depends on what you are looking for. In addition to the questions Taffer asked, do you want more tiles on the screen at the expense of readability or do you want readability at the expense of how many tiles are displayed? Are you running the game in fullscreen mode or just maximizing the window?

Assuming your entire resolution is 1920x1080 the largest character tileset you can run fullscreen without distortion would be a 24x24 or 24x32 pixel tileset (square or non-square respectively). Anything larger won't display as intended. Using a lower pixel size (e.g. 12x12) will increase your real estate (obviously). When using a smaller tileset, if you stick with the same aspect ratio as the largest tileset's gridsize that you are capable of running you can eliminate the black space. Although, as Taffer pointed out, the black space is a non issue - you're just not using the maximum amount of real estate that you could be. The distortion is what you probably want to avoid.

I imagine the black space also buffers the smaller character tileset from distortion if you're just maximizing the window rather than using fullscreen mode. That's just a guess, since I only use 12x12 and 24x24 sets to avoid black space; I resize my resolution without scaling to play DF meaning there's already enough black space and I don't want extra. Heh.

Thanks for any education you can give this hairless ape

I'm not sure if that was the education the "hairless ape" wanted - but I hope it helps.

[Max™]

Square --- NonSquare --- Resolution
48x48 ------- 48x72 ------- 3840x2160
32x32 ------- 32x48 ------- 2560x1440
24x24 ------- 24x36 ------- 1920x1080
16x16 ------- 16x24 ------- 1280x720
- 8x8 ---------- 8x12  -------- 640x360

Those are the sizes where you can fit an 80x45 or 80x30 grid and fill the screen. Leaving borders on will of course influence this, though the 16x16/16x24 sizes are less of a pain there because the closest screen size is actually 1366x768 but that would need a set with 17.075x17.075/17.075x25.6 pixel tiles.

Trying to zoom out more doesn't work without twbt, and that doesn't play nicely with adventure mode so it isn't an option if you want larger tiles to fill your screen fully.

[phillosopher]

I play full screen on my 55' 1080p tv. So I guess that running the 24x24 would be what I'm looking for then. Thanks everyone for helping the noob do his homework! And maybe I can get on last question out to the AP class, what is the TWBT all about as compared to how I used to run the game in True-type? I am assuming that it has something to do with how the sprites are produced but I don't know what the differences are.

[burned]

It's sounds like you're going with square, but I wanted to clarify that Max's 24x36 is correct and my 24x32 was definitely not correct for non-square. Sorry about that.

I have never used TWBT, but my understanding is that the author took the open source that's available and** made his own print mode via a DFhack plugin(?) - I know you need DFHack to use it. Someone else could better answer this than me, but you can find all the details about TWBT here.

If you do use TWBT, please report your game crashes in that thread first, before you report anything in the DF bug tracker. ;]

I believe the only print mode that officially supports true type is 2D, but I'm just referencing my brain and honestly don't recall. I settled on STANDARD during all the SDL testing since it produced the best results for me. I'm not sure why 2D is the default. Maybe because it's the only one that offers true type(?) - I do remember people would need to use 2d if they had "bad OpenGL drivers" or something like that. . .

. . . Yeah, that's exactly what Baughn typed. Heh. So maybe it's default to just avoid having rendering problems in the first place(?).

I provided more questions than answers, but I hope some of that is helpful.


edit: **After skimming the TWBT thread maybe it's just a DFhack plugin unrelated to battle champs. Again, someone else could better answer the whats and whys of TWBT.