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[Meph]

Wear, contaminants and quality level.



We are currently discussing if any of these would make sense ingame. It's a little bit of extra work doing this for every item and the final sprite might be less readable. Especially if three states mix.

This mock-up shows a sword and a breastplate with 0%, 25%, 50% and 75% wear (100% and the item is destroyed); as well as each quality level and four contaminants to test, vomit, blood, water and mud.

At the bottom you can find a few example with a mix of two or three states.

Please let me know what you think about it.

[Starver]

Beautiful.

Worried that it would be too much work to do all the groundwork for everything, and get everything else finished as well. Obviously it's your call on that.

[Meph]

I'd only suggest this for weapons, armor and clothing. Things that are important to use, with natural wear.

[voliol]

[...]
Please let me know what you think about it.

Honestly, I think all three at once are too much, visually. The wear is visually distinct and mechanically important, and the charm of bloody swords is too great to pass (though I wonder, why are there 4 different contaminant patterns?). But - the quality-levels atop of this is just too much, the gold details obscure the color of the base material. In the end, the base material is the most important property of an item, and should thus be recognizable at a glance. It also makes little sense that high-quality items be gold-adorned, unless they actually are (which I don’t think is possible for non-artifact items in vanilla).

Concrete points:

• Don’t use distinct graphics for item quality levels.
• To avoid clutter, only show one contaminant, and use patterns like the blood ones, that only cover part of the item, and assymetrically enough to make it clear it’s not part of the design.

[Meph]

There are four patterns to avoid too much overlap, since an item can have multiple contaminants. If they have identical patterns, the newest contaminant would completely overwrite all pixels of any other contaminant.

[Rose]

You absolutely can actually adorn any item with gold in vanilla using a workshop.

[Meph]

You absolutely can actually adorn any item with gold in vanilla using a workshop.

I know what he means. The visual adornment doesn't fit the decorations on the item. On the other hand, it's a fairly universal way to show value improvement: Add a ton of gold/gem nicknacks.

[Egan_BW]

Much as I like shiny things, I'd have to agree that it would be misleading to display quality levels as gold filigree. Maybe there should just be two base graphics for quality: normal and artifact. Artifacts usually are highly decorated, after all.
I really like the blood. Fitting, eh?
It's a little hard for me to see the difference between the 0% and 25% wear breastplates. In general it's easier to spot the wear on the sword than the breastplate.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I'd only suggest this for weapons, armor and clothing. Things that are important to use, with natural wear.

From a player's point of view, weapons and armour wear out much more slowly than regular clothes, so I'm far more interested in assessing the state of my dwarves regular clothes than the militia's gear. Armour tends to break unexpectedly after being hit repeatedly in combat without much chance to do anything about it.

Not saying clothes need it, seems like a huge amount of work, just from a priority point of view.

For Adventurer, much higher priority of course. But the Dev team often seem to rank Adventurer as an embarrassing afterthought, so perhaps even less need to do the work.

[ror6ax]

Looks beautiful, but I am not sure whether it's blood or some kind of jewel encrusted plating in the bottom row.

From gameplay perspective - wear is the most important information for me(now that I know it is a thing in DF). Being covered in blood is far less important but still possibly indicating combat that I was not aware of, wounds, all that.
Why would I want to know if a dwarf is covered in vomit or mud, gameplay-wise? I mean it may be in there for eye candy value but I'm not quite sure it would be readable anyway.

Bonus question - these are (I assume) parts of overlay on a dwarf? How will the "inventory screen" look like? If a dwarf is covered in vomit, would it be shown in this view as well or will it be showing a clean version for readability? I'm much more concerned with being able to outfit my dwarfs with most quality armour(that requires me being able to tell which armour is which quality) than being able to tell if they walked though mud recently...

A suggestion is to implement these as they are shown for units in the actual gameplay - for visual richness of the game but make the "inventory screen" versions be more focused on showing masterfulness and being encrusted with jems because those represent information a user would want to get in order to make decisions about their strategy in upcoming play.

[ror6ax]

From a player's point of view, weapons and armour wear out much more slowly than regular clothes, so I'm far more interested in assessing the state of my dwarves regular clothes than the militia's gear. Armour tends to break unexpectedly after being hit repeatedly in combat without much chance to do anything about it.

I play DF for about a year, wasn't aware that wear is even a thing. I am aware (painfully) of the need to equip my military with best breastplates available tho.

[Shonai_Dweller]

From a player's point of view, weapons and armour wear out much more slowly than regular clothes, so I'm far more interested in assessing the state of my dwarves regular clothes than the militia's gear. Armour tends to break unexpectedly after being hit repeatedly in combat without much chance to do anything about it.

I play DF for about a year, wasn't aware that wear is even a thing. I am aware (painfully) of the need to equip my military with best breastplates available tho.

Quality-wise yes, it's good for dwarves to have high-quality gear.
Instant spotting of armour wear though, besides in weapon traps, which seem to wear out quickly, doesn't seem like a pressing issue.

Dwarves running around with clothes rotting off their boodies is an actual gameplay issue everyone runs into, causes massive stress and isn't noticeable until you call up a few dwarves' minds to check what's going on. Early warning might be nice. Time to get the clothing industry underway (but not really worth doing graphics for, seems like far too much).

Dwarves pick up quality equipment by themselves. Unless you assign it individually, in which case you pick the stuff at the highest quality from a list and therefore don't need a graphic.

[Uthimienure]

Please let me know what you think about it.

No need to spend the time on this... it won't be visible unless playing zoomed in.
I play zoomed out pretty much all the time so I can see wtf is going on in the fort.
Not worth your time to go to such detail.

The worded description will give all the needed detail anyway.

Bug fixes, features, and game play are paramount. 
Shiny baubles are not important.

[Meph]

Bug fixes, features, and game play are paramount.
Shiny baubles are not important.

But... this is a purely graphical and UI related update, without bug fixes, new features or different gameplay.

[Uthimienure]

Bug fixes, features, and game play are paramount.
Shiny baubles are not important.

But... this is a purely graphical and UI related update, without bug fixes, new features or different gameplay.

I thought Toady was going to work in some bug-fixes and tweaks. Maybe I imagined that.

Don't mind me, I'm just being a grinch... I did switch over to ASCII and prefer it for the time being anyway... it's so elegant.  My first DF exposure was LNP, then I quickly discovered Masterwork DF and was hooked on that, just so you know I've always favored the Masterwork graphics and am glad you're doing Steam.

I'm just worried that all the graphic stuff will slow down Toady's game development in the future. He has so far to go on the game yet, and unfortunately only one life to devote to it.