Are there any plans to extend the number of colors beyond the 16 we have now? It would be nice to see a visible difference between gold and orthoclase for example. And as a suggestion, would it be possible to have glass items and constructions flash between dark and light shades? Dark green and light green for example.
Materials in the next version have 24-bit color, but the game will still display in 16 colors:
Will the next version display proper material colors for all items? In last year's raws preview, mineral raws still had a DISPLAY_COLOR tag, but that seems seriously obsolete. I did find a dev log reference (several weeks before the preview) to "color/symbol stuff for items/buildings made from materials," so I'm not sure what the deal is.
I don't get "proper" here. Do you mean RGB colors? The stuff being fed through the grid system rather than the creature tile system is still heavily constrained. I don't expect that to be handled until item display gets decoupled from the font tiles. If you mean using the 16 color approximation to the RGB material color, then it should use that for items. Minerals can still be weird because when they are a wall, you can't rely on the material's color, as background colors come up.
The "item display gets decoupled from the font tiles" thing should probably be coming along fairly soon, since "Full graphics support" is #4 on
Eternal Suggestion Voting.Well, with the Mayday graphics pack at least, theres sometimes different shades. For example, when I was using different colored rocks to check something out with ramps, I noticed that kaolinite was a deeper red while petrified wood came out as an orange color.
The Mayday pack still uses 16 colors, but the RGB values of those colors have been tweaked in init.txt.
Toady will the technology from the underground animalmen always be rather static? can they, lets say, defeat a Dwarf Fortress and have a chance to incorperate their technology?
Entity tech advancement won't be in this release, though I think Toady has said he's not opposed to it.
What are the Kobold's relationship with the animalmen? They were always out of the way but now they are pretty much a buffer between the surface and ground.
That's such a spoiler. Wait and see.
Does this also mean that it won't be possible or at least much harder to completely extinct wildlife/fish stocks anymore? I'm sure we can severely deplete it or make it 'locally extinct', but they will repopulate with time?
Probably not. That's a
dev_next item that isn't being worked on yet:
# I.B: Wilderness population/megabeast reproduction and improved population tracking (Core78)
# Core78, WILDERNESS POPULATION TRACKING, (Future): Wilderness population is quite limited, and worse in a few ways than it was back before the Z coordinate. This should be fixed in world gen and in regular play in all modes for all categories of wilderness or subterranean creature.