EDIT: I now think this idea could be more than just a temporary measure, but a permanent thing, see this other thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=179606.0https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/3099043827445055733Roadmap news says that it's being considered to release the Premium version before the ASCII/Classic stuff is done, because it will take months to do the Classic menus, and in the meantime there would be a fully functioning Premium release that 90% of people are probably going to be using anyway after spending months delayed.
We'd been hoping to have more of these later items done faster, of course, but a few things happened. Well, 2020 and 2021 happened, ha ha. Also, my original plan for how Classic mode might be implemented has only partially panned out. I made an ASCII friendly interface layer, which'll be a great help, but I underestimated how long it would take to retool all of the smaller clickable buttons into an ASCII-friendly state. A few menus will need to be redone from scratch, and my current thinking is that doing ASCII versions of the menus alone would take a few months. I'd mostly been accounting for keeping and adapting the ASCII glyphs we already had in place, with some alterations to support for example the ability to see multiple Z levels, but the menus have changed so much it's now a much larger project. The hard question then is do we want to delay the initial release to do this? Or launch, and then do the free update after.
But I have an idea for a quick stopgap measure to let Classic players have
something (for the record, I myself think the release should be on the sooner side and do Classic later), without it making the majority of people wait months for the release.
The part that would take a long time for Classic, from what has been described above, seems to be trying to do multilevel, and to retool the menus to fit Classic, right? So here is my idea:
Delay the multilevel stuff, and just use current ASCII characters for the world's tileset again (would be surprised if
that would take much time). Because of previous FotF answers saying there would be no multilevel for Classic, Classic players weren't expecting to get multilevel anyway, so having to wait for that wouldn't be a big deal I think (and I suspect even for them, it would be preferable to have single-level ASCII now, than to wait for a version with multilevel that they may very well turn off).
That sorts out the actual play area and makes it basically what exists already, but next to solve is the menus. Have the artists draw up a "Classic" spritesheet for the menus (all the buttons and scrollbar sliders and stuff) which superficially looks kind of like ASCII, but is really just literally the Premium tileset's menu, with an ASCII/Classic skin over it basically (all the icons and buttons and stuff, all ASCII-style).
It wouldn't look the prettiest probably, and would be in some ways kind of silly/awkward since it would be a tileset just shallowly masquerading as ASCII (for example, the "real" Classic unit list has no reason to show icons of what your dwarves look like, because they would all be the same). But it could work as a quick temporary thing for Classic players that allows them to get the bugfixes and UX changes (as well as any Steam Achievements/Workshop stuff), without delaying the release for everyone else.
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Topic: Steam release/roadmap idea: a stopgap measure for Classic/ASCII players (Read 1047 times)