Most of the questions I had have been asked already so here's a random one totally unrelated to the current work.
There's a different tile for creatures that swim under the water, there's a sun direction, there is field of view, so: Is it possible, if only in a long-term development sense, to have reflections off of water and/or silvered mirrors?/color]
-snip- I'm just super curious if your kind of graphics have this advantage over non-text games.
The main thing DF has over high-fidelity games in this case is that the resolution of DF is very low, that is, for once it isn't responsible for calculating as much. So if you play adventure mode, ray casting is already used to determine what you can and cannot see. For mirrors, if a really big mirror(water?) takes up 3 squares horizontally, then for each of those squares a ray should be casted and laws of reflection should be applied, and you can have a reasonably accurate ability to see reflections in the mirror.
While in a modern ray tracer, that calculation needs to happen for each pixel, several hundreds of times(the way raytracing works means that for each pixel a path from the camera to a lightsource needs to be calculated, and to get the a good approximation of behaviour of diffuse surfaces there's a certain amount of 'randomness' in how this path bounces off a surface, meaning that several hundreds if not thousands of these calculations need to be done to get a proper avarage of this 'random' behaviour). For 3d video games, what is often done is that each reflecting object contains a panorama image of the area from its point of view that is then used to simulate reflections. (It is actually kind of sad, the increase in resolution makes high end monitors much more expensive to render for, but people don't always realize that, it's a very common factor in graphics lag)
But like, DF, being tile based shouldn't have to do anywhere near as many calculations, so I think it is feasible.
Besides reflection, are there plans for other vision weirdness things? Darkness is a thing already, but what about refraction/simple distortion or fog?