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[Shonai_Dweller]

Why is there a  ruptured heart in the middle of that mountain range? ...Oh! Volcano. I see.
Yes. Looks terrific so far. A bit....cheerful perhaps? At least compared to vanilla. Well, that's just a personal taste thing I guess.

What are the black dotty blob things? Dark pits?

[Sver]

The tundra tile (what I assume it is) could, perhaps, be more snowy and less square. It really sticks out, as everything else (except ice) has soft edges.

Edit: another thing is maybe making wetlands more foresty, as most of them have a good amount of trees in action - they are more like rainforests than The Dead Marshes.

[mko]

great: map. Maps are awesome by definition.

good: far more readable than ASCII

opinion: too cartoony for me, ASCII styling has some seriousness/deepness (??)

poor: hills should be smaller than mountains (The Cat Problem, edition II)

bad: yellow inland is unclear, looks like a beach. Is it supposed to be a desert? Maybe more desaturated would be better?

great: desaturated deserts visible in some parts of the world. Even hills look good there.

bad: volcano seems poorly readable, I would not color entire mountain in pink, it makes it more noticeable but less readable

great: forest

great: mountainhomes (I hope that different civs will have own flag colors)

poor: marsh? this with small tress - awfully busy and unclear meaning

noIdeaHowToImprove: pink for evil works poorly here. Maybe dark=evil would work better? Pink works great in ASCII, here - quite poorly. Maybe Mordor style dark clouds would work well? Especially pinkish mountains are looking like a pile of rotting meat.

WIP: mountains clearly need far more variations, some tiles are blatantly square, ridiculous traffic crossing shapes on some river tiles, rivers floating over lakes

bad: this teal hills are ugly and unclear ("good" hill area?)

Toady: some road and river patterns are ridiculous

suggestion: saline and drinkable water areas should be differentiated

request: we need palm tree tile

[CL3AR]

I wonder if it's possible to make the map more stylized. For example, combining a square of four mountains that are next to each other into a bigger mountain. I think it would make it a bit more readable.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Awesome stuff!

If I had to mention anything, I'd say the hills feel a bit too lined up on the x axis, and also as others mentioned that the yellow savannah biomes strand out a bit too much colourwise, doesn't feel like it fits into the whole as well as the rest.

[Meph]

Some more test maps.

EDIT: New: Offset for hills and less saturated savannah.

[Rekov]

Some of these castles kind of look the top half of a huge robot sticking up out of the trees, like the iron giant or something.

[bloop_bleep]

I think in ASCII, dark purple is evil sometimes too. That works best.

And yes, I think it's a bit too cartoony. In ASCII, there is stark contrast between the colorful tiles and te black background everywhere. I think that's what gives it that gravity. Imagine if the background were light gray or something; it'd lose that tone. The dark barkground means the average color over the whole screen is actually rather dark. I think everything here should be desaturated and darkened.

[Starver]

I think you're always going to have problems with the hills/mountains and probably every other 'Miles And Miles Of Bloody Uberwald" lining up (if it aint orthagonally, it'd be diagonally, like the illusion you get looking over a large WW1 wargraves cemetary). Although you seem, actually, to have done a good job with all the trees except the orchardy/lollipop ones. Not sure at first glance if that's due to a variety of alternate tiles dithered around (pseudorandomly or cued by the tile data) ?and/?or you've actually just well-dithered by offset a single or small numbers of template tile suited for that map-spot.

But whatever you do with the firs (in particular) definitely needs applying to the mountains. The hills look vertically dithered but stand in otherwise orderly columns. There's a trend towards columns in the firs but it's broken up by conspicuous offsets, whatever the cause.



I'd be cautious about taking 2x2 cells (alike in nature) and putting a 4-cell image in there, at least not compulsively, as it'd just make a bigger pattern obvious with "foothills" in all the unreplacable edge/tweeny gaps. Unless you are willing to go further than 2x2 in size and thus allow for some of the better Apollonian packing or Crazy Paving effects. i.e. the RHS of this instead of the LHS. Or approximate it by a Penrose tiling (yes, I know you've got a checkerboard grid to work around, not saying it'll be easy!) avoiding the "still looks regular even though it actually has no symmetries" pitfall.

No, that's just going beyond your brief. Pseudorandomly dithered displacements or a large(ish) selection of alternate-but-equivalent images (like vanilla non-uniform grass from a subset of simple punctuation marks) is probably your best bet.


And that's my "you wanted a critique, and that's my critique" bit over. I like it in most other aspects and no other problem arises that hasn't already been mentioned (maybe more adamantly than I would have personally committed to, in some cases) so that just leaves me wanting to say I like the general look. Perhaps a tad less saturation might work well across the whole thing, but just like Tolkien's line-drawn maps aren't intended to have 1:1 definition of the actual land, you can only do so much with the platform you're working with. And even then it looks like you're eking out more than you might have been left with.

[darkhog]

I'd prefer if the maps had a sepia tone, like the old maps (a link because I couldn't find any reasonably small image that wouldn't break the forum). But that's just my personal opinion.
//edit: Regarding the procedural creatures and no backwards joints because of equipment - seems like non-issue to me because it looks like all procgen creatures can't use equipment anyway.

[clinodev]

I wonder if you might have a map legend already made up for Toady you could share here (and in your reddit post)? If nothing else it would probably make the multiple mountain peak comments in the reddit thread easier to sort out.

[PatrikLundell]

:
//edit: Regarding the procedural creatures and no backwards joints because of equipment - seems like non-issue to me because it looks like all procgen creatures can't use equipment anyway.

The humanoid experiments attacking my fortesses (and an coming to them [posing as] visitors) sure use equipment. I've yet to see any with backward joints, though.

Regarding the map: I'd prefer the map to show as much actual information as possible, rather than trying to emulate parchment maps (which it will fail at doing anyway, as long as the resolution of the underlaying data is at the world tile level). That is, I'd like to be able to seen what the biomes are with savagery levels and evilness levels. It would be a bonus to be able to see evil effects (reanimation, vegetation death, evil weather kinds) as well. However, I think it might be useful to consider several display modes (like old time school map books, with elevation on one map, built up areas on another, etc) to allow the player to flip through them (like the current tab for a prospective embark world tile).

[Shonai_Dweller]

:
//edit: Regarding the procedural creatures and no backwards joints because of equipment - seems like non-issue to me because it looks like all procgen creatures can't use equipment anyway.

The humanoid experiments attacking my fortesses (and an coming to them [posing as] visitors) sure use equipment. I've yet to see any with backward joints, though.

Not to mention the fact that experiments are regular adventurer choices, like animal people. So can potentially be equipped with anything.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Seriously guys, the tree trunk is fine. Yes, it looks like a stump, but thats because visually that's exactly what it is: A tree trunk cut off after 1 z-lvl. It follows the same design setup as walls. As several people have mentioned: The lack of actual stumps in the game makes this a trivial issue.

I've been using stump-like tree trunk graphics in my tileset since the start and not one person has ever mentioned it in a negative way.

How about upper level tiles casting shadows over lower tiles?
Maybe it reminds the player there is a forest instead of an open field.

[KickAssAndGiggle]

I know you guys are going to tweak and improve these maps and make them perfect, but they already look absolutely amazing to me.

I'm in awe of your talents and the speed your moving at. I can't remember looking forward to a release of any game as much as this.