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[Starver]

... but the windmill in the game atm turns to face the wind direction. Toady clearly had the traditional windmill in mind, and that's why it follows that design.

Yep, noted. Was just sayin' that that was news to me. It's either recent (i.e. five years or so, maybe, maybe longer) or I just never even paid attention at the time I actually bothered to use my overengineered windfarms.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

How about do something to make the tree trunks look less like cut trunks?

[Fleeting Frames]

It's been in game longer than I've been playing, so yeah. My first "serious" embark had windmills turn in some biomes.

[Bumber]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

How about do something to make the tree trunks look less like cut trunks?

Doesn't look like a tree anymore.

[Sver]

Yeah, that looks like an eerie rabbit hole.

[Cruxador]

It's where Alice fell down.

[Ziusudra]

I liked the gradient that someone posted quite a while back and now I can't find but kinda looked like:

Kinda vaguely matches how the walls fade into darkness.

[bloop_bleep]

Spoiler: tree trunk with gradient (click to show/hide)

I like that not necessarily because it tries to obscure the interior of the tree trunk but because it makes the tree more visually interesting.

[Meph]

I'd be ok with the shading.

[MoltenIdol]

I agree, the current trees look exactly like a cut tree from above. So a bit misleading. I get that a cut tree trunk wont have the shaded circle from the leafs and the treetop, but still.

Shading in the center of the trunk works completely fine.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I agree, the current trees look exactly like a cut tree from above. So a bit misleading. I get that a cut tree trunk wont have the shaded circle from the leafs and the treetop, but still.

Shading in the center of the trunk works completely fine.

It would be misleading if cut tree stumps were a thing in Dwarf Fortress, but since they're not...

[Ziusudra]

True, but the hopefully many new people playing, once this Steam version is released, won't know that.

Of course, as amazing as this is already looking, there's still gonna be some learning curve as to what the graphics represent.

[Shonai_Dweller]

True, but the hopefully many new people playing, once this Steam version is released, won't know that.

Of course, as amazing as this is already looking, there's still gonna be some learning curve as to what the graphics represent.

About...3 seconds to work out that a tree is a tree and not something which doesn't exist. Less if they follow the tutorial and understand that the "look" command and z-levels exists. If there were stumps and constant confusion over which is which you'd have a point.

Without reprogramming procedural trees from scratch, it's only ever going to look like a stump or a stump with shading (which looks like a stump to me). And nothing that complex is going to happen before the all-important Steam release (probably).

[Superdorf]

Shaded stump is nice. Gives it that feeling of "this is not the whole picture", without making the whole thing look like an ungodly void-hole. 

[Starver]

About...3 seconds to work out that a tree is a tree and not something which doesn't exist. Less if they follow the tutorial and understand that the "look" command and z-levels exists. If there were stumps and constant confusion over which is which you'd have a point.

As I've said before, I'm a big Vanilla person myself, but the Steam/etc launch is supposed to be visually intuitive (and also we don't know if the Look command will raise or lower in prominence in the UI bit of the revamp - though I would hope it would not be subsumed somewhat, games with nice graphics tend to only need cursor-looking for details of tiles, not a full explanation, so...) and in other top-down all-way-scrolly adventures or area management games they tend to leave "stumps" when trees are felled (by efforts of player or pre-supplied 3rd-parties) that may or may not fade away/fail to refresh after leaving the locale but generally don't just have trees vanish without remains.  (One or more versions of the Settlers franchise, IIRC, felled a tree sideways and then would leave the outline of removed side-branches as the Log resource was hauled off by the woodcutter minion.)

The only other game I can recall such behaviour is Minecraft, and (without a mod, at least in the old Beta version I last played it) that has antigrav wood that means you can slice off its bottom and/or middle trunk and you still have higher trunk visible (and leaves only vanish when deprived of their progenitor trunks or trunk-sized branches) and even then what looks like a cut-off stump is in so me meaningful way an actual cut-off stump. Even if the tree crown is also still hovering a few Zs above it.


Yes, it's a trivial point that the stump section (and roots, not normally an issue in more surface-bound games) just vanish, and so stump-parts are still connected to at least some more tree at higher Zs, but  let us not more realistically depict things that aren't actually what the thing technically is.

And though the radially(-inward) shaded version of the "stump" is slightly less stumplike, I'm not sure whether it yet looks unstumplike enough for my liking (on behalf of those newcomers I'm pleading o behalf of). Not sure what I'd do, though.


TL;DR;... it may be no more than a moment's confusion, hopefully, but I think it should be mitigated further, and ideally avoided. Good luck with that!