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[MrWiggles]

I was just wondering if there was a reason why it was only ASCII Expanded characters and and just 16 color pallet?

Personally, the ASCII graphics do not bother me. I love them, but I wish to know why not use more inclusive character sets?

Some of the complaints, I've seen here on the forum, is they can't tell what anything is from just looking at it on the screen without the aid of the look command. I feel this is legit.

Why not use Kantana, or Kanji character with it, combined that with the ascii charter, nearly everything could have its own unique on screen identifier. The Kanji for puppy and for dog on the screen, so forth.

As for the color pallet restrictions, I'm not saying going to use million of colors, that would be just silly.   But maybe bumping up to 256, preferably 1000 colors. I loved that we can it rain, and things get covered in snow, but when NPC which use these exact same color occupy these squares they're nearly invisible. With a 1000 color pallet, you could have so that the different items don't use the same colors at all. Or for it NPC to disappear with the tiles.

And the last question, is why doesn't the game use fix width? It would be nice, and just a sheer athestic here, to have a square be a square instead of an odd lookin rectangle.

I'm sure there a reason, I just like to know. I don't think these broaden pallet will break the game from its Rogue Like or ASCII dungeon delving game. But it would levitate some of the inherent issues with this type of game.

[TheDJ17]

You see this is why people make tile sets.

[Glacies]

I think the inherent problem with that much wiggle room is that it would be impossible to remember which kanjii means "Dog" and which kanjii means "Unfixed Frozen Wind". If people can't distinguish stuff now, imagine having thousands of characters to tell apart. I still like the suggestion, because I look at everything with "k" anywaysm and all the little symbols look neat. With more colors, there would be more shades of building material. This is a good thing. Your mosiacs would be shadeable, and you could do gradual shade alterations and stuff. Fancy.

The square tiles require square letters. I imagine there's an ASCII set out there that just squashes letters and stuff to make it more accesible. Have you looked around much? I hear there are tilesets on the wiki.

[MrWiggles]

I'm quite acclimated to the ascii used for the game. So a tile set isn't needed.

Unless, I'm mistaken the width issue(?) is just a font used not withy ASCII itself, as ASCII isn't a font, just a character list.

As for the more character to remember, that may be an issue, I suppose, but I wouldn't want to abolish the Look command, as it serves a needed purpose to give more detailed information. But each katana, and kanji character are unique, and players like with just the ASCII will remember which symbols mean up with enough time.

[Puzzlemaker]

Truly the reason is because looks are low on toadies list.                   

[Creamcorn]

Personally I had the same idea too, except that the idea be that we make our own ascii tile set.

[Zaius]

Perhaps the addition of italics, bold and underline would be useful?
Adds another [couple of] layers to the existing 'font', without making players have to learn Japanese. [not hacking on the idea, frankly i think a purely phonetic language is the best candidate for a 'universal language', and not the cluster****¹ that is the English language.]




1. Don't know the boards opinion on profanity.

[Awayfarer]

For the record, the three Japanese alphabets are...

1: katakana: Used for spelling out foreign words and exclamations
2: hiragana: Used in spelling out Japanese words phoenetically.
3: kanji: Used to confuse the hell out of Americans.

A lot of Kanji would be a bitch to pixelate properly. Note, too, that some katakana (and hiragana, hell, and kanji for that matter) are actually pretty similar. I might not help as much as you think. In fact, it could be worse because sometimes the only difference between one character and another is a tiny dot or line which could easily be missed.

I don't think we need more characters. Sure, that "g" could be a goblin or a goat, but it's not all that often that you'll desperately need to distinguish between the two. You're not likely to see a group of 5 white goblins on a map and it isn't likely that you'll encounter a multicolored squad of goats.

[Hydra]

Truly the reason is because looks are low on toadies list.                   

Yeah. It would however be convienient if toady would allow us to have separate tiles for certain objects as well as graphics for text characters. Would be a nice option, and would not take much more memory.

[yggiz]

I still use the default ASCII character display. I have thought about tilesets, but it is actually easier for me to distinguish ascii, than from a small picture with an even smaller widget in it.

I can not imagine playing with kanji running around all over the place, lol.

And I do expect that once the major workings of Dwarf Fortress are finished, a graphical representation overhaul will take place. I am not in any hurry.

[Duke 2.0]

3: kanji: Used to confuse the hell out of Americans. Everybody God himself Any form of sense.

With that injustice out of the way, I would like to comment on how these are placeholder graphics until toady starts to work on polishing things. And seeing as he is still setting up the walls, that job of painting won't happen for a while.
 And to continue this analogy, Magic will happen when the family that moves in decides to make a shed in the back yard.

 But back on topic, I believe more colors would be awesome. Perhaps we would continue to use the limited colors for units and their jobs, but terrain and such could fully utilize a gradient of colors.

[Align]

The stretched squares are because of an option in init.txt, but I can't remember which one, it was ages since I fixed that nuisance...

[Sean Mirrsen]

Full graphics support is due somewhere during the Presentation Arc. It's supposed to add customizeable graphics for all items and everything else in the game.

Don't forget all colors are represented as lines in the Init.txt file. And the color tag in the raws is rather awkward. The current color tag goes 0-7 with a lightness flag, making 16 colors. If we expand it to 0-F, we'll get 32 colors, but if we go the extra mile and have the lightness flag also have a 0-F gradient, we can get a whole lot more colors in, especially for shades of depth if the "flattened layer" view makes it in.

[vanarbulax]

Truly the reason is because looks are low on toadies list.                   

Yeah. It would however be convienient if toady would allow us to have separate tiles for certain objects as well as graphics for text characters. Would be a nice option, and would not take much more memory.

EDIT: I got ninja'd apparently this is coming in the presentation arc

Now I might be being thick here but I've always wondered why you can't have it so each object can have its own tile. In the vanilla version it would just come with the ASCII tiles and multiple objects will point to the same tile (goblin and goat both being "ASCII_G.png" or whatever). But then people could make their own graphics sets or compilations for each object and people would download the raws to go with it (You'd download a whole bunch of graphics and raws which would point goblin to "GOBLIN_SWORDSMAN.png" and goat to "GOAT_STANDARD.pg" or whatever). This would mean that each object, creature and writing character could have its own image as long as you downloaded it and had the raws point to the image name.

I know it means a lot of images and raws to modify but I'd bet you the community would be able to whip up a good graphics pack plus raws package.

[Chandrasekhar]

I'm pretty happy with the ASCII, but some more colors would be nice.