a .bmp file is uncompressed and as such is a larger file to host on the internet than a compressed file (such as a .jpg or a .png) which can also keep the same quality. trying drawing something in paint as a bmp and then saving it as a .png and you'll see the size difference
were the internet entirely compromised of .bmp's I think we would have grew bored of it long ago
also bear in mind that your currently using alpha stage software and as such features are constantly being added so some things atm are quite complex. Installing tilesets and altering init.txt files are a cake walk compared to mastering Dwarf Fortress itself
In regards to the language mod as well, thats come around as a limitation of the way that DF displays everything (There being only a limited number of characters available to display things with) and until the Presentation Arc has been completed or even touched on its not something that will change
If all of this ircs you then I'd stick with ASCII tbh, theres no changes needed on your behalf and you won't have to worry about half your dwarves having levers in their names or bridges that have a rogue chair symbol at the end
Please don't talk down to me like I'm a moron just as Deon has done. I am a professional developer working with designers writing training applications for a fortune 500 company for a living. I know what bmps, jpgs and pngs are. I also know that bitmaps have headers that tell the program what format the data contained is. What I find difficult is:
1. The import procedures used by Toady apparently doesn't read standard BMP file headers and makes assumptions that your file is in 24-bit color depth.
2. That tiles are separated into 2 or more files when all the tiles could easily be placed in one file for easy import and user management.
3. The wiki, where common folks would look for tilesets, has PNG files for download as the tilesets (which DF doesn't import apparently and absolutely bombs by not displaying anything, error or otherwise.)
4. The tilesets don't all have preview shots so the common user can see them in action
5. The developer adds support for caves and islands instead of improving the already lackluster interface
6. Using the client in ASCII mode. You can't tell what the hell is going on with "D"s running around and "+" like symbols used for doors. It doesn't even look like a door.
I didn't talk to you like to a moron, I tried to make everything clear to avoid new questions to things I already told.
The main point I tried to give you is that the game is basically totally ASCII and avaliability of graphic tiles is only a "gift" from Toady to us to play with, it's not a full-supported feature and you may consider it as a side feature which is currently at alpha stage.
I, personally, like how it's implemented.
If you're a professional developer, you should know that you can download a png with ANY browser directly as 24bit bmp without any conversion and it works.
And also sorry for being too detailed "like for a moron", no insult here, it's just a bit strange for me that a man who's a developer for a huge company can't deal with a few raws in .txt files while I did it easily just looking into something which is already done. Maybe I should try to work as a developer in a huge company too?
And
It's not such a simple thing. If I look at my old MikeMayday version of 38b, there are 4 different icon files in the raw\graphics\example folder
And if you look A BIT further you'll see that these files are referenced to in graphics_example.txt in a VERY easy way (size of tiles in pixels, number of tiles in file x:y), I guess it's not harder than to write an A+B=C application in Pascal. Just use a common sense.
So there could be 4, 10, 100 or 1 bmp file, you decide it by yourself.
And don't think that we're trying to insult you or to show you who's kung-fu is better, we're trying to help you, and your words are at least impolite if you speaked this way.
2Sean
... wAll of tExt
DF is in no way too demanding.
And if you look into Civ4 of Sid Meier there's a very HUGE problem with civilization flag. Even the application! which you use to make those alphas matters, some side programs give strange results because of the way they compress image to .dds (while they make appropriate dds files for icons, only flags are broken), I don't comment that it should be DXT1 and with a special (undocumented) limitation on the file size =).