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[MoltenIdol]

Re: view - I was specifically proposing a 3/4 top-down view, but Tarn decided to go for 100% top-down for the initial release.
However, the only thing the game needs to support 3/4 top-down is giving an offset to the layers in multilevel view. So that's not totally off the plate (my personal opinion).

It would be cool if there was something powerful like a customizable offset on both axes so people could make pseudo-isometric and other cool stuff.

Just like in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.  I always play it like that, it looks brillant in a simple way, adds (litterally) so Much depth to the image, by giving walls a sense of height. It just makes the worls come alive visually, and immerses me so much more. To me, that would be AMAZING for DF. I would absolutely love this. It would fit the aesthetic, if it could be made easily readable, with no walls overlapping tiles you should be able to see, and all that jazz.

Also, im in love with stonesense. Like, completely. Please
take as many of the qualities it has, and bring it to vanilla DF.

Since workshops as they are now are ultimately going to be replaced with a system much like the hospital one, I believe this is a good interim solution.

I have waited for this. Does this mean that we'll soon  have to make appropriate tools for the individual workshops? Cant wait! Oh lord the immersion!

[Shonai_Dweller]

Won't be "soon". Mythgen release at the earliest (due to confusing map issues).

[Meph]

Just like in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.  I always play it like that, it looks brillant in a simple way, adds (litterally) so Much depth to the image, by giving walls a sense of height. It just makes the worls come alive visually, and immerses me so much more. To me, that would be AMAZING for DF. I would absolutely love this. It would fit the aesthetic, if it could be made easily readable, with no walls overlapping tiles you should be able to see, and all that jazz.

Also, im in love with stonesense. Like, completely. Please
take as many of the qualities it has, and bring it to vanilla DF.

Sure, we'll just redo everything. No biggie.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Just like in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.  I always play it like that, it looks brillant in a simple way, adds (litterally) so Much depth to the image, by giving walls a sense of height. It just makes the worls come alive visually, and immerses me so much more. To me, that would be AMAZING for DF. I would absolutely love this. It would fit the aesthetic, if it could be made easily readable, with no walls overlapping tiles you should be able to see, and all that jazz.

Also, im in love with stonesense. Like, completely. Please
take as many of the qualities it has, and bring it to vanilla DF.

Sure, we'll just redo everything. No biggie.

Is it something that a regular tileset maker would be able to do if they wanted (once the update is done)? Or something CDDA does that's just fundamentally different?

[Meph]

Isometric isn't supported by the update we are making. I'm not familiar with CDDA, but I don't think it has multiple Z-levels (?)

[bloop_bleep]

Isometric isn't supported by the update we are making. I'm not familiar with CDDA, but I don't think it has multiple Z-levels (?)

Mechanically yes. Graphically no.

[Mike Mayday]

Isometric (or cavalier) are somewhat removed from what we can do.
3/4 top-down SHOULD be doable (it's just one step) but it's still a huge paradigm shift in the way tiles are drawn, so we might not end up getting that).

[Bumber]

The stockpile sign for leather had me stumped... maybe make the hide's legs a bit longer.

They could probably be extended a bit diagonally and still fit on the sign.

[Rose]

I feel like top down is fine for base game, as long as later updates give mods the option to make a 3/4 or isometric tileset.

Then we re-use all the stonesense sprites.

[Cruxador]

Re: view - I was specifically proposing a 3/4 top-down view, but Tarn decided to go for 100% top-down for the initial release.
However, the only thing the game needs to support 3/4 top-down is giving an offset to the layers in multilevel view. So that's not totally off the plate (my personal opinion).

It would be cool if there was something powerful like a customizable offset on both axes so people could make pseudo-isometric and other cool stuff.

Just like in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.  I always play it like that, it looks brillant in a simple way, adds (litterally) so Much depth to the image, by giving walls a sense of height. It just makes the worls come alive visually, and immerses me so much more. To me, that would be AMAZING for DF. I would absolutely love this. It would fit the aesthetic, if it could be made easily readable, with no walls overlapping tiles you should be able to see, and all that jazz.

Also, im in love with stonesense. Like, completely. Please
take as many of the qualities it has, and bring it to vanilla DF.

Since workshops as they are now are ultimately going to be replaced with a system much like the hospital one, I believe this is a good interim solution.

I have waited for this. Does this mean that we'll soon  have to make appropriate tools for the individual workshops? Cant wait! Oh lord the immersion!

This is potential future stuff, neither of these features are currently slated for the next update, and even that will only be "soon" under quite a generous definition. Considering the amount of other stuff that's of higher immediacy and the general pace of Toady's work, it can still be considered quicker than expected if either of those things happens in this new decade.

[Rekov]

I played around with some more stuff. It's technical and boring, and has lots of images, so I'm putting it in spoilers:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Starting with 3D models, I baked a normal map of each ramp tile. (the orientation of surface normals with (x,y,z) coordinates represented by the RGB values of each pixel)


Since DF is highly regular, this kind of map could just as easily have been generated, since it only needs 5 values, one for each slope and one for flat.

Anyways, from the normal map, I generated a curvature map. White for ridges, black for crevices:


Then I separated each of these maps into masks. Four from the normal, one for each slope orientation, and two from the curvature.

Then it's just a matter of using these masks and a variety of blend modes to defines each slope, and add highlights:


I suppose the point of this exercise is to show how you might go about doing all of the terrain shading programmatically, without needing tiles. However, given how small a sprite sheet of tiles is, I imagine that it's cheaper just making the tiles once than having to calculate shading over and over again.

[Erendir]

please transparent workshop floor.

Because otherwise there is no need to smooth floors prior to construction!

Also, what happens after you deconstruct a workshop placed on grass? The sudden transformation of stone floor to grass may be confusing (assuming this is how it works, I actually don't recall).

[bloop_bleep]

I think it might be best if the artists didn't manually create each and every ramp tile, but instead there were some script baked into the build system that automatically pre-generates those tiles, before the game is even run. Then you save some tedium for the artists without creating any performance hit in the graphics processing while the game is running.

[Rekov]

I think it might be best if the artists didn't manually create each and every ramp tile, but instead there were some script baked into the build system that automatically pre-generates those tiles, before the game is even run. Then you save some tedium for the artists without creating any performance hit in the graphics processing while the game is running.

There's very little reason to do this. By all means use whatever procedural/programmatic help when creating art. But if you only need to do something once, there's no reason to make the game do it every time you load. Why have the game generate these tiles every time, when you can generate them once, then have the artists fine tune them as desired, and you end up with a better result and less work for the game to do every time it loads?

[Meph]

Depends on the floor sprites. Each floor material would need a pre-made set of ramps. There are 40 grasses and 231 inorganics, plus some river/brook/magma/ice/(a few) mushroom-cap ramps. Let's make it 300 possible floor materials. Now those can mostly be rough, smoothed or engraved. Makes around 900.

All of which might have a track-tile on top, of any of the track directions, of which there are 14. Those need the correct shading of course.

Rekovs set has 72 ramps.

So you have 900*14*72 sprites. Just a meager 907.200 sprites.

Obviously I'm exaggerating a tiny bit, but yeah, automated shading by adding a brightness layer is the nicer solution in the end. Especially for modders/tileset authors adding their own content.