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[Shadowlord]

The manual includes instructions on updating to a new DF version or new DF install, although it won't apply to the version that Toady's going to release when he finishes his big changes - I'll have to make changes for that.

Installation instructions (if you can run modbase)

• Install modbase, if you don't already have it installed. (May require windows - probably won't work on wine)
  
• Download sl_tileset_mod_1_1_0.zip from the Dwarf Fortress File Depot, and extract it into your 'Dwarf Fortress\modbase' folder such that you should now have a 'Dwarf Fortress\modbase\sl_tileset' folder. It will also place a sl_tileset_manual.html file in the modbase folder. (These installation instructions can also be found in there, but they have been modified/updated for this post)
  
• Then, start up ModBase, tell it to scan for mods, make sure that 'Modbase Test' (if it exists) is disabled (un-check it, if it is checked), and make sure the sl_tileset mod is enabled (it should have a checkmark). You probably want to install the tileset into your init.txt automatically, but if not, uncheck 'Automatic Tileset Install'. Note that ModBase will probably eat the comments in your init.txt either way, but it saves the original init file in modbase/init_original.txt. Whether you are doing manual or automatic, continue on:
  
• Finally, click "!!! ACTIVATE !!!" After a few seconds, a dialog should pop up, asking if you want to continue and reload (the list of mods), exit and launch DF, or just exit. Click 'just exit'.
  
• Graphics for creatures are not included: You will probably want to download and install a "user graphics set" (art for creatures) from http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_graphics_sets or from elsewhere. (there are nice creatures in the "enhanced DF - graphic mod pack v2", but they're shaded like the sun is to the right, whereas everything in this tileset is shaded like the sun is to the top-left). Personally I'm using the Dystopian Qantas set compiled by Veryinky.
  
• If you are doing a manual tileset installation, you can find the tileset in modbase/sl_tileset/SL_square_16x16.bmp - copy that into your DF data/art folder, and set your init.txt to use it for its font, and set the width/height to 1280 and 400 if you are using an 80x25 screen size (or 1280 and something valid for fullscreen). To manually set the font in init.txt: Open up your data/init/init.txt file, and find your '[FONT:something]' line. Change it to '[FONT:SL_square_16x16.bmp]'. If you are using GRAPHICS mode, also set GRAPHICS_FONT's parameter to 'SL_square_16x16.bmp'. If you are using fullscreen, you'll have to set those up too (FULLFONT, etc). You may need to change the window/screen sizes. 16x16 corresponds to a 1280x400 area window if you are using an 80x25 screen size. I use the following settings (they should probably each be on their own line): [GRAPHICS:YES] [GRAPHICS_WINDOWEDX:1280] [GRAPHICS_WINDOWEDY:400] [GRAPHICS_FONT:SL_square_16x16.bmp] [GRAPHICS_BLACK_SPACE:YES] [VSYNC:ON]
  

Information about the character set / mod
This is a 16x16 user character set (if tilesets are evolutionary, this one would be descended from Flying Mage's and Guybrush's), and a ModBase mod which together allow a vastly more enhanced tileset than is possible with just a user character set alone. ModBase was very important in the development of this tileset, as it makes it possible to easily and automatically find and replace (or change) multiple entries in the raws, in addition to allowing the mod to be essentially DF-version-independent (Edit Feb 8, 2009: although it will probably break when the fancy new DF version that Toady's working on is released).

Here's what the character set bmp looks like (before anyone panics, this really links to a png ):


The manual is in the download, but also here: http://shadowlord13.googlepages.com/sl_tileset_manual.html
The download: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=370 (on the Dwarf Fortress File Depot)
A fortress map: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-3412-flamespear (one of my previous forts, re-exported after it had ceased being anything more than a testing ground)

The primary three goals in making this were:

• Eliminating graphical bizarreness (levers and other graphics in names, coffee cups for trees/cities, chairs in bridges/catapaults, etc)
  
• Having actual art for all rough walls instead of symbols, and for almost all trees. (Continuation of what Flying Mage had done for some rough walls)
  
• Improving art further, including adding new art, but keeping things identifiable, ideally without causing graphical bizarreness. (Ex: See the barrel image, ore-in-wall image (to the left of the lobster), hatch image, the levers which now have 'OFF' and 'ON' written above them in tiny text, the single ~ which has only one wave in its image, making it easily identifiable if not as pretty (many previous tilesets had the single and double ~ look identical except for which direction the waves were facing))
  

The biggest benefit from this is that text looks a lot saner, without sacrificing much of the graphics (chairs had to go, and bare trees, and mugs changed back to steins, and that was about it).

In more detail, the tileset/mod:

• Attempts to provide sensible graphics for tiles, while avoiding showing graphics where there should be text.
  
• Avoids showing graphics that make no sense (trees in catapaults, chairs in catapaults or bridges, bricks in catapaults, rivers...)
  
• Taking advantage of ModBase's capabilities to relocate a bunch of graphics to both improve appearance and to fix graphical bizarreness that has been present in previous high-graphical tilesets - for example, rough rock walls which formerly appeared as '%' now use rock wall graphics which are at character 0xb6, and the '%' character graphics still exist. No previous tileset of which I am aware had done anything like that (although it's a fairly simple matter, it would just be hell to maintain as fast as DF changes versions without something like ModBase). There are many more like that. One example is that Flying Mage made a nice crystal icon, but to make rough gems and gem walls use it, he replaced the sun/masterwork icon, which made it replace the sun, the masterwork symbol, etc. I split it into its own slot and set it up so that only extracted uncut gems, rough gem walls, and extracted bituminous coal use that icon, and everything else still uses the sun/masterwork symbol. (Except that DF is ignoring it for the extracted uncut gems, but oh well)
  
• Tries to make graphics still look sensible when multiple things use the same graphics - the winter trees and chairs in catapaults/bridges were not acceptable to me. This was particularly a concern when there are things which can't be relocated, such as smoothed and engraved walls, catapault arms, bridges, and overland rivers, all of which use the same characters (there wouldn't be enough free characters to split them anyways).
  
• Additionally, adds new graphics for a number of things which lacked graphics in previous tilesets. I drew art for tower-caps, feather trees, glumprongs, and quarry bush leaves (although the quarry bush leaves were probably silly, if dwarves don't ever take them out of bags without being ordered to dump them), all have their own art now, and there's a new graphic that's shared by cave wheat, rope reed, and longland grass. (Cave wheat and longland grass used to have the same icon as pig  tails and a bunch of other things - those other things still have the same icon they had before)
  
• Additional enhancements to the art, such as additional shading on trees, or partially or completely redrawn art, like for hatches,  or the new ore-wall image I drew, or the cage/!!! icon (which looked better as a wooden cage before I realized that it looked not-so-good as a glass one, and I had to change it to look decent for both), the new barrel icon, the levers where you can actually see the handles even if your monitor's brightness is turned down, the differently shaded walls/bridge/river/catapaultarm (this one isn't that major a chance from guybrush's, though). That's most of them.
  
• On the subject of walls, the ones with bricks in them weren't acceptable to me - Flying Mage's and Mike Mayday's both had bricks, which looked good as walls, except that brick walls look rather jarring in catapault arms, bridges, and overland rivers. It was a bit too out of place for me, which is why this tileset+mod does not have brick walls. However, if tileset/tilemod support works in a future version of ModBase, brick walls/bridges/catapault-arms/rivers can be an option.
  

Suggestions and feedback are welcome. For example, chairs look like solid stone stools right now in order to make them match up with the walls/catapults/bridges, and maybe you might want to suggest a way to resolve that without causing catapults or bridges to look bizarre (if you can come up with one). Or maybe you just want to request a tilemod that puts the chair image back in.

Edit: Updated to point to newer version of example fortress which uses v1.1 tileset instead of v1. Manual and png also point to v1.1 versions, but that's because I changed the files that they point to directly rather than changing the links here.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I'd like to point out that the PNG is now directly usable by modbase.

I should also note that manually installing a tileset is as easy as copying it into the modbase\tilesets folder. You open up modbase, open the init tab, hit the radio button for windowed or fullscreen (the current active tileset for that mode will light up), and select the required tileset from the drop-down. Then hit apply tileset, and apply init settings.

Migrating to a new version is also possible with Modbase, except graphics sets. You can save a list of init changes using the little "S" button on the init editor screen, and afterwards you can load the list when you've copied the modbase and its config files over to the new version.

[Deon]

I should also note that the tileset is quite pretty and reasonable. I will definitely consider to try it.

P.S. I may seem to be impatient, but what should I do with those flowers, brown trees and winter trees?
I mean, the game engine accepts only 1 bmp file, how do I make them appear (or are they for copy-pasting only? I didn't find that part and I don't know how to make a modular character set).

[Shadowlord]

Deon:
Thanks.

The flowers and other bmps and stuff are optional. You don't need to do anything with them. If you wanted to use them, there's checkboxes in the mod in ModBase for them which should (hopefully) merge them into the tileset.

I should also note that manually installing a tileset is as easy as copying it into the modbase\tilesets folder. You open up modbase, open the init tab, hit the radio button for windowed or fullscreen (the current active tileset for that mode will light up), and select the required tileset from the drop-down. Then hit apply tileset, and apply init settings.

Sorry, but the point of the manual tileset installation instructions is to not have your init file comments eaten. Does that eat them still?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Why do you need the init file comments? It's not like there's any useful information in there besides possible values for tags, and the built-in init editor has those covered...
*shrugs*
I'll try to find a way to preserve those if you need them so.

In other news, Modbase now allows full-masking with pure blue (no alpha transparency), and also allows any-tileset mods, though they still need to match in size. Oh, and now several tilemods can be applied in sequence to one tileset.

[Ranik]

Will this mod conflict with the new interface changes? If not i'd love to give it a try with the new larger view.

[Shadowlord]

It should work fine, I think - I tried 80x50 earlier today for a few minutes and didn't notice any problems. (But I went back to 80x25 because I really like having DF only take up 1/3 of the screen or so)

[Sean Mirrsen]

Speaking of which, modbase is now pretty much useless when installing tilesets, because it still counts resolutions using the old 80x25 tile res.

[sphr]

Nice collection you have there! Excellent work! (Credits to original creators of some of the tiles too).  Think I shall use this as a base for a long due tileset upgrade for my own game.  I've been keeping away from some of the other tilesets with some nice tiles due to some of the tile double use problem.  I'll probably swap some of the perspective tiles graphics for a more "flat" feel.. probably borrow some tiles from RedJack's nice Nintendo-like set

EDIT: I did not want to change the game data too much as it becomes a hassle to maintain when upgrading (won't know if there are changes) so I stick to plain tiles old-school style.  But I did a lot of borrowing from RedJack's and modify quite a lot... but it's still based on your tileset, just that you may not recognize all of it   This my first time doing real work with the character tilesets

here's the result:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-3320-steelfortress

Some comments for you:
I don't know if you fixed it in the matgloss, but quite a few of your tiles are not "granite friendly" (which strangely uses a reversed filter).  Thus, I had to drop your nice doors and used back modified versions of what was in Guybrush's.  There may be other cases not identified yet but basically, using your tileset (and probably most tilesets made by people who did not use granite), a lot of things look weird/wrong in granite.

[Shadowlord]

Yeah, I was noticing that myself. I actually have granite in one of my forts, and a bunch of granite doors near a bunch of gabbro doors. So I need to figure out a solution for that too.

[Some time later]
So, yeah, granite has a black background color, where most other stones have a light gray background color. However, doors' colors are also determined weirdly. Doors are using, for the door's FG:BG:FGbright, the stone's color's BG:FG:0, with the exception that if FG and BG are the same color, the FG color's brightness becomes 0 instead of 1.

So I was thinking I could just change granite to be the same color as the other medium-gray stones, but then I realized I couldn't remember actually SEEING any in the past several months... I could've sworn that there were medium-brightness grey stones that weren't dark and weren't light, but I couldn't find any in-game or in the raws except, of course, for bizarre granite. Since I distinctly remembered the 2d version making a distinction between the three kinds of stones, I ended up checking the 2d version. It turns out that the colors of stones apparently changed from the 2d to the 3d versions.

Obsidian, onyx, and jet were 0:0:1 in the 2d version. Dark stones are 0:7:1 now.
Limestone, marble, and moonstone were 7:0:1 in the 2d version. Light stones are 7:7:1 now.
Other light stones were 7:7:1 (talc, pumice, dolomite, chalk, flint),
Gray stones were 0:7:1,
and there were presumably brown stones that were 6:7:0, the same as now.

0:7:1, in the 2d version, was the color of medium gray stones, which is why I couldn't find any - medium gray and dark stone colors got merged at some point for 3d, apparently.

Actually, it looks like all those stones except granite had their BG color changed to 7. (I didn't check the non-gray stones to see if they changed too)

Anyways, veering back from that tangent, the problem isn't that granite reverses its color - it doesn't, it's light grey on black - it's that doors reverse BG and FG colors, and set brightness to 0, resulting in granite doors having a black foreground color because their BG color was black. Similar problems probably occur with things like cages and anything else that reverses fg:bg or anything like that.

Now, possible ways to fix this... Well, the only good ones I've thought of are:
1. Change it to the same color as some other kind of stone, either dark or light.
2. Change all the dark stone back to 0:0:1, and make granite 0:7:1 like normal stone. Problem: Dark stone stuff will be harder to see unless users adjust their init file color scheme (Or maybe I'm the only one with their monitor intentionally set to a very low brightness and contrast).
3. Make granite 0:0:1, which would make its doors look darker than other stone doors. This would work for doors because the identical-color-thing would give it a dark grey FG color - where gabbro etc have light grey. However, otherwise granite rocks and items and such would be just as dark as gabbro etc.

sphr:
I think I'll merge a few of your improvements back into my tileset too, like the black box lines around the X for bins, and the black pixels that you added around the white ON/OFF text which I had added to the levers. (And I just noticed the note you left on my user talk page, so I should look into that too - thanks, I hadn't noticed that mistake)

[Cajoes]

So this mod can break the floodgate/bin/up-down-stairs/letter/cursor into separate sprites?

Code: [Select]

:D

[Shadowlord]

It can break some things up - but there are others that it can't. You just listed a bunch of things that can't be broken up, unfortunately (until Toady gives us more control over it).

What it does break up are rough walls and punctuation - all the rough stone walls have their own art rather than using punctuation and crap, and it has new art for some of the crops (and rearranged what crops use what art), and for tower caps, glumprongs, and feather trees, which all normally just looked like generic trees, so it broke those up too. It also endeavors to prevent graphics tiles from showing up in names or words, by changing the language files to change the accented letters which had become graphical tiles into non-accented letters (but the graphics still show up in first names in existing saved games since they are saved by letter instead of word).

Edit: I think I'll make granite 7:7:0, actually, which will make its rocks and things made from it stay light gray (rather than white or dark gray), its rough rock walls will just look mostly solid light gray unless I give it its own tile art, and its doors will end up with the same colors as chalk/limestone/etc doors.

[Shadowlord]

New version uploaded to the File Depot now, 1.1.0. Changes:

• Merged in sphr's version of the up-stairs (which has more background color in between each stair step)
  
• Merged in sphr's version of the X (which has two black boxes around the exterior of the tile to give bins a separate-bin look
  
• Drew black pixels around the ON/OFF text over the levers, which is also something sphr did in his version of the tileset.
  
• Fixed misalignment of many tiles (reported by sphr)
  
• Granite's color is now 7:7:0, which is light grey on light grey, unless you disable the new 'Granite Color' mod component. That might seem odd, but it keeps its stuff light grey while making its doors not be reversed - actually, its doors look like chalk/limestone/etc doors, but that's better than looking bizarre. However some granite items may look odd, particularly hatches. (It looks like there might be another way to do this, though. Some stone types have a [BASIC_COLOR:7:0] component - maybe that would make items made from it light grey on black)
  
• Possibly improved the stone door icon a bit.
  
• Drew an image for metal doors.
  
• Added a tilemod component which, if enabled, changes the stone and metal door tiles to their ASCII tiles.
  

Same download link as before: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=370

[Havlock]

I think there's something wrong with either Modbase 0.95c or your mod, 'cause I can't get the TILEMOD portion of it to work. When I check any of the TILEMOD options on the menu and activate it, Modbase doesn't merge the tiles into the existing tileset or create a new tileset. And I tried it with the default PNG files, as well as converting them to BMPs and editing the mod instructions to use BMPs instead of PNGs. Maybe you could check it out?

[Sean Mirrsen]

It's probably Modbase. It works for me, so I can only proofread the code to eliminate potential errors that cause the problems for other people.