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[kaypy]

While I am, from too much roguelike experience, in the ascii-over-graphics camp, I find that the DF ascii representations of creatures tend to be rather ambiguous. Right now I am getting ready to start up a new fortress, and so I am once again trying to find a better letter-critter mapping.

This time I thought I would post my ideas here so anyone likeminded can steal and/or comment on them.

Critter Type	Letter	Examples
Ape	a	gorilla,orangutan,etc, also apelike: troglodyte, sasquatch
Amphibian	A	Giant Olm, Giant Toad
Bear	b	black bear,polar bear, etc
Bird/Bat	B	giant bat, giant eagle, giant cave swallow (small birds are '.', etc)
Canine	c	dog
	C	wolf, ice wolf
Deer	d	deer, elk, gazelle
Dragon	D
Elf	e
Elemental	E	fire imp, blizzard man, magma man, iron man, mud man, etc
Feline	f	cat
	F	cougar, lion, tiger, etc
	F	Giant lion, Giant tiger, etc
Goblin	g
Small Humanoid	h	gremlin, grimeling, gnome
Human	H
Kobold	k
Monkey	m	chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, etc
Ox-like	o	muskox, cow
Ogre	O
Pachyderm	P	elephant, hippo
Rodent	r	racoon, large rat, groundhog, etc
	r	giant mole, giant rat
Reptile	R	alligator, beak dog
	R	sea monster, hydra
Shark	s
Spider	S	giant spider, giant scorpian
Titan	T	titan, colossus, giant
Troll	t
Ungulate	u	horse, goat, camel, warthog, mule
Unicorn	U
Walrus	w
Whale	W
Crossbreed	x	chimera, griffon
Hydrid	y	small *men
	Y	large *men, satyrs, blendecs, harpies, centaurs
	Y	stranglers, nightwings, werewolves, minotaurs
Dwarf	@
Demon	&
Fish	α	fish that your dwarves eat
	α	fish that eat your dwarves
Treant	♠

Some notes:

I am planning on adding bold versions of some characters as shown here, but it is used more along the same lines as colour differentiation

'u' for horses is familiar from nethack, but still a bit of a stretch for the number of critters I have stuffed in there. At least they are all pretty interchangable domestic animals

There are way too many things stuffed under hybrid, and Im not too happy with x for crossbreed.

There dont seem to be many canines, looking now, but I dont really want to lump dogs (probably friendly) with wolves (probably hostile)

Any thoughts and suggestions welcome

[Mohreb el Yasim]

i don't like your new characters,
i dont even know what "Ungulate" is (ok now i know) but feel free to make it for your (it is just some moding ...
god luck for it ...

[Neoskel]

You missed the fox.

Also, how is this better in any way than the current system? It seems like it would just provide unnecessary confusion, much more so than the default.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Uh, no. No unnecessary confusion. Quite the contrary, if you don't take into account the way we're used to the current system.

ADOM has this system, specifically. I suggest ripping it direct from there.

The basic premise is splitting the icons according to relevance to species. ADOM hit the nail on the head with those for the most part.

[kaypy]

Im considering a fox a rodentalike at the moment, although maybe it should be a small canine...

Im not sure how transferrable different roguelike letter systems is going to be- there is a tendency to find critters to fit the letters rather than vice versa. That Toady has just taken a large randomish sampling of actual fauna is part of what makes this challenging. That and those tendencies towards hybrids that ensure that purring maggotmen are pretty much an inevitability if we wait long enough 8-). He may stop before gabbrocabinetmen, he may not...

I'll go and check it out tho... Hmm... Its been *years* since I touched ADOM...

I am considering adding a convention like 'underline means anthropomorphized' so I get eg R lizardmen vs F tigermen...

[Sean Mirrsen]

You do know DF is limited to 256 tiles, right? And that many of those are hardcoded to be used in various items and landscape features?

[kaypy]

If you strip the language accents you wind up with a fair amount of wiggle room. You would be hard pressed if you wanted to add bold or underline for *all* characters, but at the moment I only have half a dozen bold characters, and would only be adding about the same in underlines

Actually, you could also do this entirely in a not-very-graphic graphic set, although at the moment I am just tweaking the raws because: (a) its easier and (b) I will probably want to swap a bunch of colours around eventually (or would, if there was anything on the my map that wasn't skeletal), so I would be tweaking the raws anyway.

[Deon]

If you succeed in it, it would be very nice. Now I'm used to the current system but it took a few days to get used to it since I was a hardcore ADOM player before.

[kaypy]

If you succeed in it, it would be very nice.

Well that kinda depends on your definitions of success. I currently have DF running with the table as shown in the original post, but havent had any vast improvements to make on it.

I could upload what I have to the file depot if it sounds useful in its current state...

[magikarcher]

If I made an ASCII game I would probably end up with similar symbols for the creatures as DF does. I think most of DF's are logical, more so than c = dog. I understand the 'c' represents canine, but canine could also represent many other creatures, so I think that 'd' is less confusing. Just my opinion though.

[Keolah]

After years of playing Nethack, ADOM, and Crawl, I actually like DF's system. (The only bit of it that really threw me off was U for humans... so I changed them to H, I'm not likely to think a caravan of horse-people is coming unless I actually mod in a race of horse-people...) There also tends to be a lot of ambiguity and arbitrarity in such a system as you suggest. For instance, deer are as much ungulates as some of the other stuff you listed.. and chimpanzees are apes, not monkeys. Monkeys have tails, chimpanzees do not. And why would bears be a lowercase b and birds and bats be the uppercase? I could go on.

[kaypy]

On chimps- in game terms they are a lot more like eg mandrills than eg gorillas, regardless of whether they have a tail. Im going to favour practicality over correctness here. Basically, if its big, Im calling it an ape, otherwise a money.

On birds vs bears- the coin toss came up heads.

Ungulates are admittedly a problem, but Im trying to remove critters from that group, not pack more in. I can get away with horses='u' for me primarily for historical reasons. Everything else in that group is just along for the ride.