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[Silverionmox]

When viewing a fortress, you can see one level and a bit of the second and third. That's cool if there's a lot of mist, but ordinarily you'd expect the deeper levels to be visible from eg. a mountain top. The lower levels could be displayed with appropriate darkening of the tiles to show their depth.

Additionally, instead of a horizontal cutoff, there could be an option for two vertical cutoff modes, for which the same darkening of tiles (or making them more cyan) might be applied to simulate squares further away.

[jaked122]

this would  be easy for toady to implement and would not interfere too much with performance or appearance

[Footkerchief]

Great idea, but I'd have to see it in action to tell whether it makes things confusing or not.

Does "vertical cutoff" mean, like, a side-view vertical slice?

[personjerry]

yes wouldn't it get confusing, shading on a 2d surface? by defn of birds eye view that doesn't make sense for different layers.

[Footkerchief]

I've seen shading-to-suggest-depth stuff that looked good, I just don't know whether it would work for DF in particular.  Some mockups might come in handy here.

Also, maybe instead of always darkening, a "fogging" effect could be used.  For indoor areas you'd use a black "fog," which would just produce a darkening effect, but for outdoor areas you could use the sky color instead, so that "far-away" z-levels would kind of fade into the surrounding air.  This would make hillsides look amazing -- you'd be able to see so much more at once.

Later, if DF ever has some halfway decent lighting, the tile brightness could be used to determine the fogging color.

[Sowelu]

You'd have to combine this with the special icons currently used for 'stuff on a lower level', rendering most things invisible.  Otherwise, that white stone eight levels down looks just like dark stone on this level.

If objects were rendered on top of some depiction of a floor this would be a somewhat smaller issue, but they're not.

[Footkerchief]

If objects were rendered on top of some depiction of a floor this would be a somewhat smaller issue, but they're not.

They kind of are -- they're rendered on top of a background color which usually comes from the floor.  Although that background is usually black, so darkening it wouldn't accomplish much.  Perhaps a dark gray "fog" could be used instead?

[Silverionmox]

I tried this: 9 levels of a tropical forest on a hillside, the picture set at 90% brightness before adding a new level.


I notice the different shades of colours, used for the objects, are messing with the feeling of depth. Also, the small animal kind of falls between the layers.

So:
- A stronger darkening/colouring would show less levels, but make the difference between them clearer. Uniformizing the colours might take care of that too, but diminishes the informative value.
- Objects and creatures will be difficult to pinpoint, but you still get the benefit of seeing them in one 2d-picture, so you can follow a titan going up the hillside without trouble, and send your soldiers without frantically switching views to keep track of everyone.
- And finally, it does give a better image of the shape of a mountain. Alternating the ramp symbol for each z-layer might help to distinguish between them, since one ramp icon is superfluous in this view.

[Footkerchief]

The JPEG artifacts are making it impossible to tell whether that looks good or not.  I think it definitely needs stronger darkening -- there's hardly any difference right now.  Maybe try with a more conservative tileset that doesn't have big blobs everywhere?

[Duke 2.0]

 Perhaps show vanilla, along with a slight scaling adjustment for each level? I remember people doing something like that for a parallax example, and it looked rather nice.

[ACE91]

I like this idea, so I did a little GIMP magic and created examples for both the depth-by-darkening effect, and the depth-by-fog effect that a previous poster mentioned. I use a fairly large tileset, so the images are pretty big.

Depth by darkening:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Depth by fog:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Footkerchief]

I like this idea, so I did a little GIMP magic and created examples for both the depth-by-darkening effect, and the depth-by-fog effect that a previous poster mentioned. I use a fairly large tileset, so the images are pretty big.

Depth by darkening:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Depth by fog:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Nice, thanks for making those.

The darkened one looks really good -- I'd definitely use that.

The fogged one looks weird, but mostly because it looks like the hillside is covered with smoke -- I think the fog is too light gray.

[mickel]

Yea, the fog is too light gray I think. Not sure though. Darkening one looks good. It would be nice to have it fade to blue, as if it were actually filtered through an atmosphere. Then again it might not work for the short distances we're talking about.

[Sowelu]

The fog one is visually unappealing due to the color choice.

The darking one is hard to use, because if you press "<" once to look at the next layer up, could you tell at a glance whether you're at 'ground level' or not?  Would a newbie be able to tell?  Would that newbie be really confused why he can't select anything?

Unless you can select things on the next level down, you need to be REEEEALLY careful about this, for newbies' sake.

[Footkerchief]

The darking one is hard to use, because if you press "<" once to look at the next layer up, could you tell at a glance whether you're at 'ground level' or not?  Would a newbie be able to tell?  Would that newbie be really confused why he can't select anything?

Unless you can select things on the next level down, you need to be REEEEALLY careful about this, for newbies' sake.

Well, the V-menu already selects units that aren't actually under the cursor -- it makes sense that that would work across Z-levels, too.  And the V and Q menus make the selected unit/building flash, so it shouldn't be confusing for newbies.  There might be SOME difficulty with the K-menu, but I think "Open Space" combined with pronounced darkening/fogging should be enough to clue them in.  And this should probably be an init option anyway, possibly defaulting to off.