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[clinodev]

I'll be honest, the transitional terrain idea really worried me until I saw the grid overlay in the recent video. As long as we absolutely 100% always know whether we're going to get smoothed marble or smoothed diorite, for example, This looks like a welcome addition.

[Starver]

The boulders though, they do stand out a bit as something being displayed edge-on instead of top-down, they resemble the style of the items you've drawn, i'd expect to be able to interact with them.

They can be interacted with, albeit in a distinctive and (I think) unique subset of ways. If you think of them as "natural furniture", in seem ways, they are in the right subset of graphical convention. (Not multilevel, as mentioned, block wagons but not (other) creatures like traps do (save for any entrapment action), is effectively a pile of knappable stones for Adv mode[1], I think.)

Ok, in Fort Mode they're "smooth to remove", almost like "remove ramp" is for that feature (but without pick needed), and like unbuilt ramps they can be subsumed by a construction over them. (Does this also remove the ramp when deconstructed again?[2]) Just another sign of a seemingly ad hoc inconsistency of the game, nothing to do with graphics, ultimately.


[1] I forget, are you supposed to be able to use a boulder as a stone-item building material in Adv mode? It's one thing I recall mentioned, but never tried myself.

[2]  I'm beginning to realise how many potential interactions I don't use often, or indeed at all, even in a Fortress. But that question isn't a question to this thread, just an idle musing to myself, that I may test next time I power up DF.myself.

[Eric Blank]

Yeah, it's a weird suggestion, I just thought it fit because basically the only thing you can do with boulders is smooth them over or build over them in fort mode, so it's kinda like the rest of the terrain, like rough stone or bare soil tiles.

It would be nice if you could pry them up without a pick and use them like a rough stone though. but that belongs in the suggestions forum.

[PatrikLundell]

The fact that they block wagon movement (as pointed out above) is sufficient reason to make boulders stand out a bit, as it's something you're going to hunt for when your depot access is broken (as an aside, I support the suggestion to be able to "mine" them without a pick).

[Urist McBlind]

Hi, I'm sorry for returning to the topic of ramps, but was having them not occupy the entire tile considered? By this I mean having the horizontal floor extend a few pixels into the ramp tile before the slope starts.
This could help readability in places where opposing ramps meet (the flat terrain extending into the tile forming a gap between the ramps). While the current ramps have mostly fixed the perspective-flipping problem for me, having the ramps form perfect geometric shapes is still disconcerting. I think the transition from ramp to flat ground looks great, but it doesn't work quite as well at these collision points, making my brain try to see the 3D shapes they must surely form, especially in those places where three or four orientations meet.
Maybe it would help to round the outside corners on corner ramps where the slope hits the ground? I understand showing the intersection between slope-planes at corners helps readability, but having the line extend all the way to the corner of the tile throws off the perspective since the diagonal is longer while presumably covering the same height it implies a softer slope than the horizontal or vertical slopes would suggest.

[Meph]

Making the ramps shorter will make them appear even steeper.

[Starver]

There are any number of ways to do ramps, and I think there are flaws for each.

Something similar to one of your suggestions was when I played with 'tying' any ramp apex to the appropriate mid-sides (for any definite orthagonal ramping) or corners (for any definite diagonal ramping) extending a conic 'pile' in towards the inner (or even eliptically to reach the opposing exge without overflowing the adjacent edges) from each such point. Then 'in-filled' over any octants spanning joining such adjacent corners+midedges concerned (and, optionally, across those between and didn't but weren't needed a same-level or down-a-level access). Easy to mathematically establish the 'mask' for every one of the cases[1].

It looked Ok in any trivial form of single-level view with hyposometric shading (floor to ceiling range) but the directional-shading alternative (either 'standard' top-left lighting or sunlight-direction hueing) necessary to seemlessly depict multiple layers (with or without bathymetric shading for depth-perspective) rather made it look less lovely than the seemless-slopes (if not being seemless onbthe boundaries between differently-directuonal slopes).

Enforcing (or over-using) flat plateaus/strips between planar sections of ramp also makes things look odd (regardless of the rendering mask method). You get 'terraces' on multilevel slopes (rather than 'corner patios' for edge-but-not-corner-reaching conics) where you'd expect a more steady hillside. And what you do with concave slopes matters a lot. Ditto 'saddle' configurations, and multi-saddled ones. (Not that they are too common in natural landscapes, but they do occur, and can be expected to arise in deliberate player building/digging operations.)


...sorry, I've just thought/experimented a lot about this subject. In leiu of having put any of this information to good personal use, I'm left trying to put into mere few words what is probably better dealt with in any number of properly annotated diagrams in a whole dedicated essay on the subject!  But make of it what you can.


(And, yes, wot Meph sed. While I was trying to make this post not look too dense and unreadable, and failing.)

[1] Actually tried it out on triangular, square and hexagonal tiles (plus, for a laugh, pentagonal ones, assuming a spherical geometry (dodceahedron), just because it sat in that sequence. Obviously, tri-tiles have the least self-set details (especially after reducing to archetypes to cater for every rotation and reflection), but are complicated by each corner-connection may have to link nicely with three ( 6 - self - (2*side_adjacent_tiles) ) 'diagonals', depending on your given rules for inter-tile movement, and that hurts when adding a sufficiently "neighbour aware" tile profile. Hex-tiles are actually much nicer (even more so pents, unless you go with a hyperbolic geometry instead) as they have six edge-neighbours, but no corner-only ones, so you can reduce the archetypes (or complications of procgenning each tile mask on-the-fly) quite ignificantly. Square-grid tiles are actually not very good, except for being easier to work with in raster-graphics rotations without fudging integer triangular coordinates (and, by extension, hexagons) from a half-a-diamond that has cordinates coming from a sheared-square.   ...Or so I worked out at the time. But I probably missed half a dozen other data-tricks that actually can be used, as I only did all this for my own entertainment.

[Meph]

Starver, in what profession do you work? If that's not too personal to ask.

[Urist McBlind]

Hmm, yes I can see it looking odd on multilevel views. I wouldn't mind making the ramps look a bit steeper, but i guess short of doing an unreasonable amount of contextual differentiation between ramps it would be difficult to implement if you want to avoid terraces. I think terraces might not be terrible to break up the blockiness of the continuous slopes as they are now, but without a mock-up its hard to say.

Also, I was looking through the recent update video again because I don't think we've had a good look at multilevel ramps elsewhere, and I noticed the grass tiles spreading over the top of the ramps. If that is intentional, I think there needs to be a better lighting transition; the ramps going down are on a different z-level so the fade creates a stark contrast.
I also noticed another ramp configuration which doesn't quite work:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think the best solution here would be to just have the ramp run flush with the tile, without a corner. It's not quite right, but I don't think this formation would occur like this in reality, so there probably isn't a perfect one.

Something similar is happening here (you can also see some of the blockiness I talked about above):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I genuinely have no idea how this should look. It might need diagonal slopes (sloping in two directions at once) to work, which I don't think are a thing at the moment.
Or maybe, on the vertical edge, the slope going to the right could dominate, instead of the one going north. There is definitely going to be a sheer wall somewhere which is supposed to be traversable, though. Or I could have this completely wrong, because it's nigh on impossible to read.
That's the problem with going from ramps in the abstract to visually defined ones...

PS: Dayum Starver you make my post look like baby talk Thanks for the 'splainin

[Starver]

Meph: Computery things in various capacities, that do not (possibly[1] to my regret) knowingly involve the gaming industry.

McB/everybody: Yeah, sorry about that. I know what I (think I) mean, but I forget to stop explaining sometimes. Ooh, look, a footnote longer than the paragraph it arose from...


[1] OTOH, it means I can safely sit in my armchair, being an armchair expert, rather than have to provide deliverables to fickle consumers who don't share my vision, via impatient intermediaries who don't share my own sense of priorities and concept of scheduling. It's bad enough in what passes for my day-job!

[Meph]

I have my own solution for ramps, which is just using a lighter gradient for up-ramps and a darker gradient for down-ramps, but that will probably remain in my modded set, not in the official SteamDF tileset.

[Urist McBlind]

No worries Starver, its always nice to hear from someone who actually seems to know what he's talking about. I'm more on this side -> "fickle consumers who don't share my vision" 
Really thankful for Meph's (and co's) patience and willingness to engage.

[Rekov]

It looks like the slopes don't look smooth across z-levels because the bottoms of the ramps on the z-levels above are shaded as if there is ambient occlusion as a result of a neighboring floor tile.



There is a slight band of shadow along the bottom of both of these ramp tiles. It makes sense in the left example left where the angle with the floor tile occludes the light, but doesn't make sense on the right where the continuing ramp is a flat plane.

But while this could be fixed, it is probably not worth the effort of doing so, because it would mean not just having ramp shading for every possible ramp shape, but every possible ramp shape in combination with every possible neighboring tile in multiple directions, and that would be quite impractical.

[Uthimienure]

Seems fine as-is because it delineates the z-levels.

[Cruxador]

Do you think using this technique elsewhere, to also ease transition between other tiles would be good?

We use that a lot. Did you see the world map?

Yes i did, and I think the technique really works.
Im REALLY looking forward to playing this graphical release once its "done"

Im purely talking about the terrain when "in game", looking at your fort or adventurer.
Its purely an aesthetical suggestion, and I realize it might be a good amount of extra work.
But i think it would look good when applied to even more terrain.

Take for example the image nr. 4 (i think it was), with the patchy terrain.
If you could have that same way of transitioning between all those tiles, i truly think the "patchy square looking terrain" problem would be almost solved.

Although i would like to add, that SOME hard-borders between tiles, once in a while, might look really good as well (especially hard borders on grass tiles), and make the terrain come off as more "natural", like a forest floor, with werid irregularities and big tuffts of grass that almost creates a small "overhang" (with a hard border).

It might create the (wanted IMO) illusion of more uneven terrain, without it actually being uneven Because of differing z-levels.

I think this could look good, but I also think getting it to consistently look good in the wide variety of procedurally generated terrains would be incredibly challenging. Things like that would definitely be an improvement still, but with so much else to do, I reckon the reward is probably not worth the effort.

Seems fine as-is because it delineates the z-levels.

I think it's superfluous for that purpose. The way DF generates terrain/slopes, there will nearly always be some flat areas close enough that the player can mentally "fill in" the missing info and know where the difference between z-levels is. Exceptions to this will be vanishingly rare, enough  so that they don't need to be specifically designed for; the grid covers most cases where it would matter anyway.
However, I agree with Rekov; although it would be an improvement it doesn't make a big difference and the cost/benefit is very questionable. I think it should probably be on a list of things to do, but more likely on the "would be nice but we probably won't get to this in the foreseeable future" list rather than the "definitely get this done by steam release" list. And not even all that high up on the list, honestly.