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[jecowa]

windmill interpretation:


in-game animation:

[ror6ax]

Some more test maps.

EDIT: New: Offset for hills and less saturated savannah.

My 5p:

It's too cartoonish, especially trees and "houses". Hills/mountains are forming an incoherent noise.
Making them darker and introducing some degree of variance in contrast/brightness should give a more lifelike feeling to it.
Also, it's hard to tell how embark indicator will look like on such a map. I see it now. Looks quite "hi-tech"ish to me, not very fitting to DF aesthetic.

I do like slightly randomised positions of the pine trees. Looks natural.

[therahedwig]

Wait, how are you supossed to indicate there's a hamlet somewhere if not with a teensy house? The houses are so simple, I am very curious how you cannot make them look cartoony. (And, the 'Ć' is supossed to be a teensy ascii house with an inclined roof)

[Shonai_Dweller]

Wait, how are you supossed to indicate there's a hamlet somewhere if not with a teensy house? The houses are so simple, I am very curious how you cannot make them look cartoony. (And, the 'Ć' is supossed to be a teensy ascii house with an inclined roof)

Add stripes maybe? They look like teensy concrete houses rather than teensy medieval wooden/brick/wattle and daub houses. Tough for something so small though.

And again, biome based buildings would be a great addition here. The house just looks daft in the desert and swamp. Just as the Dwarf Fortress doesn't fit properly outside of mountain ranges (only an issue when the player starts embarking).

[voliol]

Are those black cages meant to be goblin ”pits”, taken literally as holes in the ground with glowing eyes? They look off, might have to do with the shading.

I have a hard time seeing the fields next to hamlets as fields, they look more like banners or hay bales on  top of the rooves. The houses themselves are cute though, they make sense for a hamlet.

[Manveru Taurënér]

This was the latest mockup version posted on reddit btw:

[ror6ax]

(top left)


Also, take a look at darkened mountains:

Darkened mountains FTW!

[MoltenIdol]

TREESTUMPS:

Treestumps are possible, if you cut a tree one z level above the ground upon which it grows. You already have those sprites done i guess.

Is that true? Wiki says otherwise:

It is enough to designate only one trunk tile for cutting to chop down the whole tree it belongs to. Any trunk tile will do, even those that are above ground, or even a single tile of a multi-tile trunk. As a result, it's impossible to "prune" trees by chopping down only parts of them.

Hmm, i could have sworn it happened to me in One of my forts.. Anyway, stumps Will probably be In the game at Some point.
All that aside, i Really think the shaded stumps look good, both for consistensy in the way aspects of the game are being vizualised, and Also very aesthetically pleasing.

The trees looks way more "impassable" with the shade inside. Which they are.

I can also imagine what a Really wooded area would look like with shaded stumps:         really good.

Because of how bright the sorroundings are in general, darkness is a good way make a contrast between passable and impassable terrain. Just like the case with dark walls and bright floors. It kind of organizes it quickly to the eye.

They darker color makes them pop out as impassable terrain in an instant, and Even adds a false sense of shadows on the tree.
As in, theres generally a Lot of shades and shadows cast in a forrest. The tree shades do a good job, but the stump shading only makes it better.

MOUNTAINS:

Yes please to darkened mountains.
It makes the actual "triangular mountain peaks" look taller.
And yes, less like metal.

Also, Maybe do Some more varied mountains, and Some offset stuff like with the Hills?

[Pillbo]

I am curious what the fungus trees will look like. Are they all spotty and colorful like the logs in the Meph pack mod?

I would also like to see what a multi-tile tree would look like if you have any that you could share.

I have no strong feelings about the tree trunk shading, but it looks as much like a stump to me with it the shading as it does without. Maybe it would be more obvious on multi-tile trees though.

[Proudbucket]

As it is the windmill is displayed topdown, the length of the blades do change but the perceived shape does not. This gives the impression that the blades of the windmill suddenly get chopped and enlarged on cycles instead of conveying a rotating effect.

Check for example pictures of windmills in which the blades have different shape, not only different length.


Admittedly in that image the point of view is not perfectly aligned with the rotors but a small angle might help to display the blades.
As an example, the very small angle seen here helps to display the rotor blades and help to convey the rotating effect.

[Starver]

(Hating myself...)

I did enough work with the raw basic image frames to confirm that they don't get chopped, but they neatly scale. In a hand-crafted manner. Yes, it still looks like an extending thing, but it is proportional somewhat like a pantograph/scissor, not like the visible part of a piston-rod. And the upward blade appears above the centre to hint at the true context, though I've mentioned the inherent deficiency in a two-frame animation already.

Spoiler: Talking (photo)shop. Or, in my case, GIMP. (click to show/hide)

To indicate height (relative mean level) I tried block shading (a combination of brigthness and contrast, actually, mostly in the darkening direction) in my poor transformations, uniform against the component frames spliced from the original to retain symmetric images (albeit out of phase in time of appearance), but I had considered highlighting the feathered nature by grading front to back (maybe darking to the back of the straight out upblade, lightening to the back of the equivalent downblade - but might have needed the opposite), plus an additional gradient from hub to edge when not horizontal. The next step might have been to sheer the rectangle (instead of rescaling in the length direction) in some way proportional to off-horizontality, and redoing the straight-up tile image to carry this sail-twist over and through the top position.

But I'd be doing all this with mostly post-processing methods on the demo artwork. I don't have the ability (as in skill) to go in there and alter single pixels or lines of pixels, without such a reference, and make it look good (like the grain and knottiness of the planking). Every filter I apply just ruins those little details that a true artist would retain or refactor purely by eye and stylus and pallette coordination to... just work. Don't ask me how they do it.

(Ho hum, do I post this? If you're reading this then I did.)

[Cruxador]

(updated image posted on reddit)

Dunno if there's another way to fill in gaps in the mountains that people complained about, but I don't think this approach is worth it. The mountains just feel really out of place and blurry now, looked waaay better before even with the green bits, imo.

Is that image supposed to have the gaps filled in? Because they're still clearly visible.

I think the trees look fine. Leaving stumps when you cut a tree down makes more sense than a hole into your fortress does, but it seems more like a suggestion forum post than a tileset issue. You can't really fix game weirdness with the art.

This is only tangentially related to what people are actually talking about there.

[Inarius]

It's a good map. Not great, not bad, as they said.
Maybe some ideas from other people like here dragons abound could be used ?
All in all, it's some good job. Nothing to be ashamed of.

Maybe a bit more contrast overall ?

[FrankVill]

Now you can distinguish the different mountains well and the purple tone of the devilish area I like more. And the colors are a little more muted. In general I see it well, I like this new aspect more.

[vettlingr]

This was the latest mockup version posted on reddit btw:

Nonononono! Revert the blur! Revert the blur!

I'm wondering if the mountains should rather look like plateaus, with the peaks looking as they do now or something similar.
Though by now I think it is best to follow the original design. The white highlight/snow? on the peaks is a simple and good addition.
Make the green gaps dark gray or what ever shader colour (greyish cyan, magenta?) you are using to make most of the grumpy old ladies happy.
Either that or change the basic shape of the mountains to be more of a half-spherical shape to cover as much of the gap as possible

Are the caves with a flag supposed to be fortresses? I always imagined them more like the warhammeresque Iron gates flanked with two huge Dwarven Statues.
They don't really stand out or break up the mountain regions they are in as of now.
Also... convince toady that different settlement sprites for different biomes is a good idea, even if you end up not using it, the Mod potential is great..

A few other pointers:
Tundras are not really seamless.
Rocky wasteland?, steppe? uses outlines with too much contrast. (the sand dunes with the white spikey bits sticking up from them.)
Dark pits as well, use a less violent black outline. It is very unclear to me what they are supposed to resemble.
All the forests are spruce. Yet there are NO SPRUCES INGAME

Some Obvious ones, I assume are WIP:
Savanna borders don't match, volcanoe is too red, Ice and tundra lackborders etc.

Just a few kinks, most can be fixed if added support for tile variation

The stump looks fine as is, though with the new walls and how they work, in addition to which direction you end up going with the thick tree branches, the shader makes sense.
Directional walls may not translate very well to bendy and round treebranchs though.
A good thing with the internal shader is, that you can use it in a alpha layer, to better show if tree is designated to be cut down or not. i.e. it will turn from black to dark yellow/brown when designated.