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[Hapchazzard]

If we're going to have profession-based clothing, would it be possible to have soldiers at least accurately display what armor they're wearing? It'd be pretty practical and useful to be able to see whether the army that's attacking you is dressed in some ripped leather rags or if they're sporting steel plate. Of course, it's impossible to represent every single little piece of armor that they have, but what they're wearing on their torso and legs should give you a pretty good idea of what they're armor in general is like.

[Cruxador]

Didn't you yourself say in another thread that the steam forums, for example, are a mess of ignorance

I didnt say that.

You said someone was complaining that the women have beards. Which is more polite than my phrasing, but same general idea.

Now you're implying that an option can't be correct unless it's backed by the majority?

No? That's not what I meant at all. I'm saying that the majority of the feedback comes from a minority of the players.

Perhaps I read too much into it then, but otherwise I must have missed what you intended to convey by choosing to point that out when you did, sorry.


In any case, we're deviating a bit from the topic here.

[gchristopher]

gchristopher: Color-coded levers would be great. You can put color-coded notes next to it though... atm lever would look like this:


Red/green and I/O for on/off, for the colorblind players.

No idea about colors yet.

Awesome!

To illustrate color usage, here's a typical, partially completed fortress entrance where I use color-coded levers and identically colored bridges to make it easy to tell which ones go together. (Without notes or help from dfhack.) This is only five colors (the purple is for purple hatches one layer up that drop the gold carts full of gold carts into the cyclotron grinders. (Nesting carts for extra mass explains why the T and the blood has only made it as far as the first grinder, but this is an early game before any serious sieges.)

(Annotations added with the text that might be in the note over each lever, but in general, they control the identically colored bridges to their left.)


Constructions on serious long-term games get a lot more complicated than this, so the clearly colored levers, bridges, hatches, and doors help a lot!

I do have wormy tendrils, (all grasses in fact), but Mike urges caution from adding too distracting grasses. There are 40 grasses and 7 growths, and the sprites I made for those might be too much.

In general, I agree with him here, but the evil biome grasses would be the exception. Wormy tendrils and staring eyeballs are supposed to be a horrendous writhing mess. Don't back down from making them that way in the official graphics.

I'm on the side of trying to keep it less visually painful. I don't think we should ever intentionally make the game hard to look at. That will happen on its own naturally from the accumulation of tree droppings, evil rain, blood/gore/expended bolts/teeth.

I almost always play in evil biomes, and when the surface is an eye-bleeding mess of pixelated animations, I either change the tileset or mod wormy tendrils out of the game. There's no reason to inflict eyestrain on myself in the name of trying to enjoy a game.

[Starver]

Couldn't you put related tools on top of their clothes? E.g., a blacksmith has a tool belt over their clothing. You could also give them a color-coded sash instead of coloring their whole outfit.

A coloured sash was my thought earlier in this thread (or micro-tabbard/whatever, sufficient to be seen even over similarly-hued underlay, but not to be deemed 'clothing'), then I morphed this idea into maybe an effect like an aura, halo or some sort of floating hula-hoop band around them at a handy height. If animated enough to demonstrate its disconnection and lack of ingame reification.

Or, if a sash, one sash-orientation (\) could be civilian, the other one (/) could be military. Heck, you could even retain any [civ|mil] sash as a subordinate layer when they don the [mil|civ] one, according to any rule of significance you care to apply (master+ of a profession retains the indicator, say, when on militaey duties just to stand out from mere dabblers in anything non-military conscripted for their weapon proficiencies). It could also mix and match the current wielded weapon (or tool) with the actual expertise(s?) they have.


But that's far too complicated, I'm sure. I'm not even even your primary market for all of this gorgeous-looking graphical bounty, I'm afraid, so take my admiration for the work, please, but you don't need to bend over backwards to try to apply my 'solutions' to what I know is going to be a hard thing to implement within such a narrow span and height of pixels.


I see someone also mentioned shadows of tree-tops (to distinguish them from stumps, though stumps aren't classically a thing without sending a woodcutter up a Z to chop at Z+1 level, right?), and I was previously (except that I thought I'd only be lurking, so refrained) going to suggest a 'ground shade' of overlying Z-obstructions. If the graphics engine could manage it, more diffuse the higher the shadow-casting Z was (adding loads of necessary computational power, but then you're already stressing one core of you CPU with all the physics, you might as well ask the other core(s) to pull their weight, right?  ).

And one can continue the above ideas with half-transparent/'hovering and bobbing' overlays to put hints over other things (e.g. your icon(s) indicating stockpile types, with or without any goods in them to show explicitly, allowing a food stockpile with left-over logs in it to show both intention and reality).


But this is beyond my paygrade (especially if this is now a financially remunerable effort, congrats!) so probably not a set of ideas to take too seriously. But food for thought, or at least a quick snack to keep you going before your late lunch, right?

[Meph]

Top-down screwpump with an impassable tile:


With 3 frames more and some shading:


Maybe we can add a color overlay when it has liquids inside:


Sashes would be cool, or toolbelts, or whatever, but... there might not be that many pixels left for clothing, clothing color, sash and profession-somethings. ^^

Remember, this is the size we are using: (red shirt, brown vest, brown skirt, green/farmer sash)

[Rose]

The 4 frame animation is going in the wrong direction.

What about showing clothes, but have an easily changeable option to either show real colors or job colors? Stonesense does it this way.

[Hommit]

Second animation is good (except twitchy handle)
Btw, windmill animation should have atleast 4 frames.

[Rose]

Top down also has advantage of needing no extra sprites for different directions.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I believe this might be a case of Toady getting screw pumps a bit backward to start with? All the images I get up of an archimedes screw imply the operator would stand at the end of it, pumping towards himself, whereas the DF version works the opposite (and would imply the operator is pumping while underwater/magma, or somehow be standing under/over the pump).

[Cruxador]

Top-down screwpump with an impassable tile:


With 3 frames more and some shading:

Looks pretty great. As Japa says, you've got it pumping towards the pumper, which isn't how it works, but just mirror the actual pump part. It does look like it has a relatively low water capacity (shallow threads) for its size, so it might make sense to allow an extra two pixels or so between each thread, but it's basically fine now - I'm just picking at nits since of course I want it to be as good as it possible can. I'm not sure the handle works as well; it looks like it's staying up but just wobbling back and forth, I think because the perspective doesn't change.

Maybe we can add a color overlay when it has liquids inside:

It's a good thought. Those specific colors look too saturated though, it's like water with blue and red food coloring. It might need actual spriting rather than just a color overlay to look good, unfortunately.

Sashes would be cool, or toolbelts, or whatever, but... there might not be that many pixels left for clothing, clothing color, sash and profession-somethings. ^^

Remember, this is the size we are using: (red shirt, brown vest, brown skirt, green/farmer sash)

This works way better than I expected, it looks great. You could probably knock off a whole sash pixel from the rightward side of the image (the dwarf's left) and still have enough sash if you're concerned about using too many pixels, but honestly I think it's good now.

What about showing clothes, but have an easily changeable option to either show real colors or job colors? Stonesense does it this way.

Well, it's definitely an option. Having seen the sash, I think that would make a good default that compromises between the possibilities, but I do reckon adding an option to hide the sash for purists would be significantly easier on the Toad (and possibly on the CPU) than having two separate systems for how clothing colors work.

I believe this might be a case of Toady getting screw pumps a bit backward to start with? All the images I get up of an archimedes screw imply the operator would stand at the end of it, pumping towards himself, whereas the DF version works the opposite (and would imply the operator is pumping while underwater/magma, or somehow be standing under/over the pump).

That would be typical, but I'm assuming Toady made a modification to the design for gameplay purposes so that dwarves could pump water or magma without drowning or immolating themselves. It would only take like two or three gears to transfer the force to where the dwarf stands (definitely over, since a screw pump takes from the level below it; this is why a dwarf can stand on the downward side of the pump without being immersed in anything) regardless of which end the handle is connected to. Figuring out what the hell is actually going on with a DF screwpump could be a good idea for spriting, but actually I think a relatively simplified version where there's a handle on the downside could be fine, even though it wouldn't be very ergonomic in real life.

EDIT: Actually, if you consider the function of the downward tile in accepting power in a pump stack, slapping a gear on there somehow might make sense. Say, one on the end with a gap to allow the fluid entry, and one perpendicular to it on the side, with the handle then projected over the pump itself? Just thinking aloud, no idea if this would look good in practice.

[Manveru Taurënér]

True. Is this intended to be a sprite that takes up more space than the two tiles it actually uses? Might make more sense to stick the lever where the dwarf is actually located (assume there's some cogs underneath) and have the actual screw extend properly down towards the water/magma source with that shading to imply it's going down a z-level? And cover the screw for the bit where the dwarf is to imply there's some platform going over? If there's a way to make that look good with pixel magic that is

Edit: Something like this, sorry for the lack of paint skills Dx



Something like that would be what would make the most sense relative to ingame I'd assume? Though the dwarf would cover the lever then, bah, not my area of expertise exactly so eh, just spitballing here ^^

[Rose]

Come to think of it, it might look good with half the number of threads.

[Cruxador]

Come to think of it, it might look good with half the number of threads.

That would be five whole pixels of additional spacing. Maybe it's worth a try to see what it looks like, but I think it would be less aesthetically pleasing than a more moderate change.

Although now we're headed towards debating individual pixels, and down that road lies madness.

[Meph]

I dont think I can paint it the way it should look in RL, because the pump is only on one z-level.

This looks interesting...

[Manveru Taurënér]

Interesting in a good way or bad way?

And yeah, maybe pumps will be one of the things changed when we get the whole engineering update, but for now making it implied one end dips down into the source would probably help a lot with making new players understand somewhat how they work.