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[Cruxador]

Not that I have any idea how easy something like that could be.  You guys talking about the automatically changing sprites got me thinking about it.

The game already does this by default. All they've got to do is not intentionally break it.

but colors is also a great idea. I'll add it to the list.

The danger with relying on color too much in too many different areas is that things can become a confusing mishmash quickly, especially if they always have those colors, as opposed to just when you've got an overlay (like how zones show up). I think the icon and border plan is better in this case.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Obviously, there are practical limits on what can be done. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, for example, clothing the sprites of animal people such as the olm men who will almost never appear clothed in game. I'm also talking about things like coloring dwarf clothes arbitrarily on profession rather than respecting their actual colors, since inheriting colors from the raws is already in the game in other forms, and being able to see the color is the whole reason that a player would choose to color their clothes in the first place. At least that one, unlike the never-nude nudists, has a gameplay justification, but it's still far less important than allowing players to successfully color their uniforms and then have colored uniforms.

And to reiterate in a general sense, the whole point of going with WYSIWYG graphics over ASCII-based icons is that what you see reflects what you get as accurately as possible.

But totally WYSIWYG actually makes the game harder to see what's happening since you can no longer tell dwarves apart by profession which you can in Classic.

Not that profession really means anything. You're still going to have a guy dressed for cheesemaking working the forges in complete disregard for safety standards. So...maybe you're right. Focus should be on clothes and not professions at all.

Question for Meph, what sprite will an axedwarf (highest skill axe) weilding a sword get? Sword hopefully. Interface is confusing enough working out who's equipped with what without the damn sprites showing fake equipment. Oh, and there's a guy on Reddit showing off his artifact stone cabinet and how many kills it has, doable?

Is any of this useful or would you rather I stop now and get back to my ASCII hole?

[Manveru Taurënér]

That ballista is gorgeous! 

Not sure which way I lean on the clothing part. While I'd personally love to have them colored the way they're actually dressed and just have to learn to recognise their particular clothing and attribute matchup, having them color coded by profession is a huge help obviously for a lot of people, new players especially. Naked vs clothed feels like a significant enough thing that it should be visible though, since imo it's much more useful to instantly be able to tell that someone is naked than to be able to tell what profession the seemingly upset dwarf has, or in the case of animal men instantly be able to tell that it's a savage one vs a civilized one, or other cases where naked people may occur.

How many of these details are actually in flux still btw? Would be silly to argue over things that are already set in stone for now.

[Meph]

I was thinking the game could do it, more like- someone makes a mod of new type of mushroom, and they point the raws at the built in sprites for stock mushrooms with a red filter over top, so you get visually distinct objects that fit right into the look of the stock art.

I'll ask Tanya. In theory it should be fine for the Steam version, as long as they don't use the sprites in the free version. Recolors would be the easiest way, yes. If nothing major changes, people can just do that in the raws btw, no need for changing the pictures. Just change the color values in the text files.

As far as the actual look of the animal-people sprites goes... well, it works, only the biggest animal people (like, say, that elephant man) have these really enormous heads compared to their bodies. It's kind of cute, actually... but maybe not what you were going for? I dunno.

Agreed, the large oversized creatures don't work with the small bodies. My idea is to wait till we've done the Giant (megabeast) sprite, and use it's body as the basis for the large creatures.

Not that profession really means anything. You're still going to have a guy dressed for cheesemaking working the forges in complete disregard for safety standards. So...maybe you're right. Focus should be on clothes and not professions at all.

hehe, Mike will love you for this.

Question for Meph, what sprite will an axedwarf (highest skill axe) weilding a sword get?

Sword.

Oh, and there's a guy on Reddit showing off his artifact stone cabinet and how many kills it has, doable?

What's doable? A stone cabinet?

How many of these details are actually in flux still btw? Would be silly to argue over things that are already set in stone for now.

All of them. We have time to discuss and throw ideas around till the villains release and the bugfixes. Only after that will Toady commit to coding the steam version.

Crafts preview, critique away!

[Shonai_Dweller]

What's doable? A stone cabinet

He's wielding an artifact cabinet in battle.
That and all the regular misc object users. Is it possible to show them all with the sprites?

Oh, and I'll be annoying once more since you're now doing this officially. How about figurines and statues which resemble their descriptions?

[silvernocte]

Crafts preview, critique away!

Ooh, goods look nice.
But do figurines normally have a base?
Sometimes, they seem to be diorama-like, but dwarves carry these things around like jewelry, and that seems hard to do with a square plate at the bottom of each figurine.

[Meph]

Well, technically it would be possible to just show a cabinet where the weapon would be, but that's really not ... any sort of priority. And would look visually very confusing.

Statues have far too many posible descriptions, and figurines are supposed to be rather small, so they have even less pixels to use. I think we will go with 1 statue and 1 figurine; although I wouldn't be opposed to doing something like this:


Just using greyscale creature graphics on a podium as a way to create a statue. I already do that with dwarven statues in my own tileset, although it's random, not fitting their description. I think it looks cool though. But don't get your hopes up; I'm pretty sure it will be 1 statue sprite.

But do figurines normally have a base?
Sometimes, they seem to be diorama-like, but dwarves carry these things around like jewelry, and that seems hard to do with a square plate at the bottom of each figurine.

Just look at any type of RL figurine. They do have bases, how else would you put them somewhere? Mind that the crafts are not using the correct relative size. The sprites show much larger items than they are ingame. Has to be that way... a dwarven hand is 2 pixels, so 1 finger is 0.5 pixels, so a ring would be... 0.15 pixels?

[Cruxador]

Yeah, profession is pretty much just highest skill. It can be pretty misleading and I think it only continues to be relevant because it was the thing Toady thought of to color them way back when. As long as you can tell soldiers from non-combatants, I don't think any other profession info is important.

I was thinking the game could do it, more like- someone makes a mod of new type of mushroom, and they point the raws at the built in sprites for stock mushrooms with a red filter over top, so you get visually distinct objects that fit right into the look of the stock art.

I'll ask Tanya. In theory it should be fine for the Steam version, as long as they don't use the sprites in the free version. Recolors would be the easiest way, yes. If nothing major changes, people can just do that in the raws btw, no need for changing the pictures. Just change the color values in the text files.

There shouldn't be any legal ambiguity, changing the raws would recolor the tree graphic in the steam version or else it would recolor the ASCII tile in the classic version. A graphic derived from the steam version shouldn't be packaged for a freely available mod I guess, legally, but it would be fine on the workshop and even if someone does something that technically they shouldn't, like use a couple premium sprites as a starting point for their own work, I reckon it would even be fine to look the other way except in an egregious case.

Agreed, the large oversized creatures don't work with the small bodies. My idea is to wait till we've done the Giant (megabeast) sprite, and use it's body as the basis for the large creatures.

I'm actually kind of digging the Babar-like vibe of that elephant man.

Crafts preview, critique away!

The earrings look like finger rings, and the crown looks ambiguous. I think both of those would be better without the gem. Although if the gem is meant to inherit color from a decoration (it would be cool if it sparkled in all the colors of decorations like stained class windows) then maybe just shrink them instead. The bracelet also looks like a short length of pipe, but I guess fundamentally that's what a bracelet is anyway.

What's doable? A stone cabinet

He's wielding an artifact cabinet in battle.
That and all the regular misc object users. Is it possible to show them all with the sprites?

Oh, and I'll be annoying once more since you're now doing this officially. How about figurines and statues which resemble their descriptions?

Neither of those are reasonable. The former would require a weapon-sized version of every item in the game to be sprited and turned into an overlay, the latter needs a sprite for every item, creature, and combination thereof.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Nice indeed, would prefer a slighly more generic figurine though (as in not specifically a warrior). Imo it's best to make something that could represent as many different things as possible. Like just a small figure in a simple pose like this. Not sure sure on this, but isn' t bases on figurine like that more of a modern thing? Like people used to carry those kind of figurines depicting their gods etc around with them for protection or what not?

[LordBalkan]

Phew, Cruxador is giving his blood on it hahahah. jk

Well, technically it would be possible to just show a cabinet where the weapon would be

Hahahah just by reading that is funny to picture the dwarf carrying a cabinet instead of a sword 

Crafts preview, critique away!

I have to agree with Cruxador on crown. I couldn't really think of any other ideas though...

But! For the armlets I was thinking something like these (that fit well close to the armpit)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

or those (that looks like a "arm-shield" close to the hand?)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The idea of incomplete "circle" fits better. I mean, who wants those things to get stuck in your arms.... right??

[Meph]

Nice indeed, would prefer a slighly more generic figurine though (as in not specifically a warrior). Imo it's best to make something that could represent as many different things as possible. Like just a small figure in a simple pose like this. Not sure sure on this, but isn' t bases on figurine like that more of a modern thing? Like people used to carry those kind of figurines depicting their gods etc around with them for protection or what not?

I think you might have a point. I was mostly going by action-figurine. ^^

Good point on the open bracelet too. Makes perfect sense.

Bone versions anyone?


The gems are just highlights. It should keep it's color, but it's mostly so that the rings/earrings don't look like circles. A circle could be anything.

Edit: How about this for a crown?

[CarpBiter2000]

Nice indeed, would prefer a slighly more generic figurine though

Yeah, I agree. Right now it looks a lot like the statue sprite. Personally, I would prefer something more distinct.

Just look at any type of RL figurine. They do have bases, how else would you put them somewhere?

But do we really need them to have bases, though? I too, actually, didn't think of figurines as things having a base untill you brought it up. It's not realism that's important, I think, it's our ability to recoginze stuff right away and distinguish one from another.

[Cruxador]

I was gonna say this earlier but forgot. For showing wounds on animals and other races besides the main four, for whom it wouldn't be reasonable to make "wounded" graphics, a wound overlay seems to me like a practical "good enough" option. Just a line, or perhaps like three images of progressively more lines, in blood red (or, preferably, inheriting their color from the creature's blood as defined in the raws). Ideally these wound overlays would be masked to the sprite so that the wounds don't also extend to the creature's surroundings, but if that's too much work on Toady's part then that's fine too.

The gems are just highlights. It should keep it's color

Oh, yeah then scrap it. It's fine if things that are meant to be circles look like circles.

I like most of the bone stuff, but neither of the new crowns look like crowns. Since it's meant to be recognizable, take inspiration from historical crowns, which have as their foundation a band that encircles the head, and then go up from there. The high fantasy design of "anything regal that goes on a head" only works if there's a head in it to reveal the situation.

Also, remember that earrings don't have to only be rings. If you're doing different ones per material, you can consider that for example, bone earrings would likely be of one or several bones hanging from the "ring" that goes through the ear.

Edit: Oh, and I agree that putting bases on figurines is weird. They're presumably supposed to be the sort of figurines that were common in history, not something like the plastic collectables that have been popular in recent decades, but consider that even those shelf ornaments rarely have bases.

[Meph]

As I've said: You guys have a point with the figurine. It was my mistake, thinking of modern collectible action-figurines.

Anyway, medieval bee hives look weird:


Modern ones are just a box. Soooo easy to draw. But nooooo, we make a weird heap of ropes on a table. Sure. Why not.



Cruxador: I'm mostly going through all the missing items rather quickly right now, just to give Mike a little shock when he comes online. None of the designs are final, and I'm sure that he will have plenty of good ideas to improve whatever I muck up.

Edit: Floodgates... Do you think they are a bit like a dam?




Mh... technically they should look like this:


But that's not really 32x32, but 46x66. :/

[Death Dragon]

I'd love if we could eventually reach maximum WYSIWYG, but that is a very ambitious goal. Being able to directly see that half your fort's population is naked or that one of your soldiers is wielding a cabinet would definitely be hilarious. Some things are obviously impossible though, like accurately representing the 20k bees that a dwarf is holding in their hands.

- The mini-grid rooms with both wood and bags are the stockpile represantation, am I right?
There is a small (?) chance to add some kind of way to differ each one of them depending on wich material are stocked in it?
Say, yellow for food, green for rough material, gray for weapons and so on...
Or... a way to add inscriptions on it? Don't know, something like "Food Pile 2", "Gems pile 34", "Wood Pile".... you get it, right?
OR EVEN both the ideas? hahah just dreaming high...

We can already name stockpiles, maybe displaying the stockpile's name on screen wouldn't be a bad idea. Kinda like Prison Architect, but that game goes with a whole "floor plan" kind of art style and this wouldn't work with very small stockpiles:


Problem about icons is that they don't work well with custom stockpiles and it could be confusing to tell what is just an icon of an item and what is an actual item.