I know the discussion has moved on a bit, but there were some things that were in large part at or about me and I was busy (corona is hitting my area now) so didn't have time to respond promptly. I've tried to not make too avoid minor points and avoid making too terrible of a gigapost, but there's a lot that was either a continuation of previous discussion or that I felt I could say something constructive about.
Just see above: one comment is about how amazing it is that grass is just grass and doesn't distract from the gameplay. The next is about how grass should be wild and full of colors and flowers. Two opposite perspectives. Neither is right or wrong by default.
Sybir: Thank you, and thank you again for showing how different opinions can be. 
To clarify, I wasn't saying the grass in general needed to be brighter, but specifically the spring flowers. As for the grass in general, I like what you posted some pages ago and all I said about it is that since it's already a highly constrained palette, it doesn't need to change to even less contrast.
So what do I idiot do? Talk about a compromise, then get attacked for it, then say "ok, let's politely say that those are just opposing views", get attacked for it some more. Thanks. Really helpful, constructive criticism on the actual pixelart.
To be fair, "agree to disagree" is an offensively meaningless banality when it's about something with wide reaching impact that you're going to either do or not do. Obviously, the stakes are very different, but imagine a politician enacting measures that you find heinous, and telling protesters "agree to disagree".
If they are only posted on Steam Workshop, are edits of the official Mephday/premium graphics okay? If they are, people could alter the graphics to their own preferences and conflicting standpoints like this would be largely dealt with.
This was specifically endorsed in one of the initial Q&A sessions, on either Discord, reddit, or both – I don't remember exactly. The Community Management person treated it as if it was an obvious thing actually, which is a perspective I kind of agree with, but said that people shouldn't use it as a basis for mods released in public (free, non-workshop) cases. In other words, the policy is pretty much what you would expect.
What you must consider is that you are all familiar with the game. I just saw ASCII being called beautiful here, which by the definition of most people is a bit of a stretch. Show Dwarf Fortress vanilla ASCII to 1000 random gamers, and I don't think you will hear that word a lot.
The problem with the ASCII is that it is dense and hard to get into, not that it is incapable of rendering beauty. There are plenty of works of art out there rendered in ASCII, with typewriter characters, or similar. And Dwarf Fortress in particular is great at not only revealing but emphasizing the beauty of certain natural scenes, whether they're spring flowers, autumn leaves, or the crash of waves against the beach.
If units show the equipped armor, and all races share a similar setup of items, the units will end up looking very similar, since a large portion of the sprite would be made up of the helmet, armor, weapon and shield.
So, why not a set for every civ? (Freshly made WIP mock-up, not final, not ingame. 
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Just to clarify, but these are meant to represent typical loadouts and not equivalent loadouts, right? Since elves in particular can quite commonly be in non-elf civs and have metal equipment.
Guys, I've been reading the discussion here and I wanted to give a word of assurance.
I appreciate the unique beauty and elegance that Tarn managed to achieve by playing with just symbols and colours. I appreciate the insane amount of detail, variety and changes in the game. If I didn't find it artistically inspiring, I wouldn't have agreed to join the project. I'm going to do my best to translate all that into graphics.
The reason why I was mostly working on creatures for now is that there is very little interdependence between them. You just make a sprite in the right style and that's it.
Civilised multi-layer folks, ramps, walls, floors and trees however are a huge effort to produce a coherent, clear and good looking overall product - and that effort is so much harder when you don't have a version of the game to test on, which has been the situation until now.
Another thing is that (for me at least) it is important to release an MVP (minimum valuable product) as soon as possible to receive feedback from actual players, rather than from viewing screenshots. This means we're making a conscious decision to limit the amount of "flair" for the initial release. Like in the example therahedwig posted, it's silly to base a lot of work on a concept that might itself be completely rejected after user review.
So yes, coloured clothing, seasonal changes, multiple grasses - I really hope we'll be able to do all that, but for now we've gotta focus on the basics!
Although I agree with this in principle, I would consider MVP for a graphics enhancement to be superior in all regards compared to the initial graphics, and given the free tilesets made by you and plenty of other folks, that bar is sort of higher even though technically that's not the fair comparison. Although you're already far beyond that point when it comes to creature graphics, and I understand the reason for it since you've said it, but I'm sure you can appreciate why people would be more concerned for the other things.
As part of the fight against clones - is it possible to make each type of armor have several alternative variations when displayed on a character?
I'm certainly hoping we can do that as well. Not possible yet, but Tarn has only just started the actual coding (and it's going fantastic).
I'm not 100% sure on what you're talking about; I hope this is meant to be conditional based on details of the individual. If it was purely aesthetic and random, please reconsider or at least make it easy to disable; it's hard enough for uniforms to be uniform just based on how dwarves are with their items.
This is a more complicated question. Back when I added constructed walls, the intent, and as I recollect, the prevailing sentiment, was allowing you to patch up holes in your walls without the fort looking like a patchwork. I agree the smoothed picture will look better, but as I currently understand it, we shouldn't make constructed walls look different. Unless opinions have changed. Obviously an option would be best, but that's fiddly, and keeping the default the same way may avoid an outcry.
I think with the greatly increased resolution, it should be reasonable to have the best of both worlds, where block-constructed walls can resemble smooth walls with only faint lines different that don't stand out much. For things that are rough (unsmoothed walls and walls constructed of stone) if they look patchwork it's fine since that reflects what's actually happened, which is that speed has taken precedence over aesthetic.
Love the details. Though I was wondering if it was an artistic decision to make the colours have a washed-out/desaturated appearance?
It seems to me that generally they've desaturated landscape and background stuff, while this is much less the case with creatures. Although I've argued for exceptions to that even in this very post, it's not a bad principle.
I fear like there is going to be a LOT of such questions and I'm wondering if it's productive to focus on them.
No, it's just not been implemented, much like ramp graphics bleeding out to neighbouring tiles.
Please remember, we've only just begun the coding part! If you don't see something that was discussed, it's 90% because it wasn't tried yet.
In this case it's fair grounds for clarification since the gem wall was specifically showcased in the screenshot. I reckon I know more about this project than almost everyone who isn't directly involved, and I couldn't have answered that.
Are you planning to introduce something like TwbT layer system for each tile with -bg and-top files?
I would not like to give the tile colorization just to the will of ingame color algorithm - I would like to indicate through translucent layers where and how much to color.
They're doing that, but it hasn't been specified whether they'll use alpha or index transparency. I would imagine alpha since the way they've been talking about this emphasizes stuff that's easy for people without specialized programs or knowledge, and that's how .png normally works, and nobody really uses index anymore anyway. I've argued in the past for arbitrary numbers of channels (which would imply tiff support normally) since that can have a channels for material colors, and whatever number of them is preferred, and then there can be a channel for alpha if DF gets coded to do that but I think it's slightly more resource intensive. And my suggestions of that nature have been more or less ignored, which suggests to me that Meph and Mayday don't really know how to do it in the first place and just a simple .png implementation is more likely. Not sure if they can say more on this; seems like it's one of those things where since Toady hasn't got to it yet it's still just up in the air.
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Topic: Steam/Itch.io tileset - Mayday/Ironhand - Discussion and Suggestions (Read 455658 times)