Community feedback bonus round: Kennels!
Kennels are only used to tame small animals. That's it. They only need 1 boulder, block, log or bar to be build. Kennels are 5x5. Kennels are weird.
In vanilla DF, kennels are shown with 4 grates and 2 earrings (?), which makes no sense to me. Instead I'd go with 4 animal-traps and 2 chains/ropes, since that has something to do with catching animals. I would make the kennel floor tranparent, with rock/dirt at the animal-traps, like a little barn or cattle shed.
What do you guys think? (#1 vanilla setup, #2 my idea, #3 on constructed floor with vermin added for fun, #4 on grass.)
I don't think the vanilla actually has rings, but rather, it has some item which is most closely represented by the same character that rings are. In any case, I think your take on it is solid, with the exception that it has the same flaw as a lot of your workshops do: The cages lack an appropriate appearance of depth. Seriously, just extend the tops like 2.5* as far back, and their appearance will be greatly improved.
It's up for debate. I'd prefer if professions are visible, even if it means adding tools that aren't there; Mike takes your stance, with professions being not very important.
If you consider things from a factual perspective and look at the actual design of the game, professions are not only not very important, they're very nearly meaningless. There is no such thing as a profession in-game, dwarves are just colored by highest skill (or a few specific gestalt cases) because that was most convenient when dwarves were first added to the dwarf game many years ago, probably closer to two decades than to one, and since then it has never had opportunity to be changed until now. It's important only in the sense that there's a tradition among spriters to account for it, since it's the only element that was available to account for. But it isn't actually very meaningful in its own right; not only is the information conveyed of limited importance (thus suggesting that the value is not higher than other opportunities that could be derived from color) but it implies itself to be of higher importance than it is, which means it could lead players unfamiliar with the game to assume that their master cheesemaker and accomplished weaponsmith is useful, because how important is cheese? In this very much non-rare situation, the value of showing profession prominently can even be negative. How, then, can it outweigh the value of giving people what they pay for, and using graphics to represent what's going on in the game as accurately as is feasible? It's sacrificing a primary goal of the tileset in favor of something of arguably negative utility.
And I know I'm repeating myself here, but it bears repeating. This graphical overhaul should be seen as an opportunity to significantly improve how the game is presented, not just to make incremental upgrades to the methods which the very premise of this endeavor holds as inadequate.
Good idea... Trick question for you: With the current rock-wall style we use (inside is black), how would you portray a rock-wall that is revealed from above, without being mined, without it bordering on a floor tile?
The only valid answer I see is that you need a ninth tile per stone type, one a bit more like the old wall tiles in that it's designed to fill the tile (or at least most of it) without respect to its surroundings. In other words, a circle or star within your 32 pixel tile showing stone, ore, or whatever else may be there; where your current stuff patterns stone/etc moving away from the line which is the exposed edge of the wall, this would have the same patterns moving away from a point in the middle of the tile. Anything you bodged together using the eight wall tiles so far developed would look bad, and digging downward is an often enough occurrence that this shouldn't look bad. But I think it's find if these revealed tiles don't actually tile well with each other, since there'll rarely be even two adjacent cases revealed, much less many.
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Topic: Steam/Itch.io tileset - Mayday/Ironhand - Discussion and Suggestions (Read 461471 times)