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A) Angled Square

30 (31.3%)

B) Smoothed Square

21 (21.9%)

C) Angled Circle

39 (40.6%)

D) Smooth Circle

6 (6.3%)

Total Members Voted: 95

[LegoLord]

Ohh, a reveal feature? Does it break Magma stuff like reveal usually does?

My guess, looking at how it works, no.  Tweak flags tiles as revealed, whereas that is supposed to read the tiles and display them, I think.

[Vattic]

Nice little mock-up there reminds me of when I did some pixel art, argh its got loads of compression artefacts though.

Hopefully when viewing the z-level you are in your mock-up anything above that level shouldn't normally be visible and the walls on the same level should be 1/3 of the size or lower so you can see behind them. It could be an option to show/hide them like this. On that note the same would apply to the ground itself, again having an option would be nice, being able to toggle both constructed walls and natural walls could be separate options.

I'd do a load more mock-ups showing you what I mean if the original can be supplied without the compression artefacts, not sure why there are artefacts with .png though.

[Footkerchief]

Piping inputs back into DF is straightforward, as Mithaldu's Lifevis demonstrates.  The difficult part is going to be synchronizing the menu state of your interface with DF's own.  For example, when the user is selecting building materials for a rock wall, what items should show up in the list?  Depending on how DF stores its menu state, there might or might not be an easy way to figure it out.  The worst case -- having to duplicate large amounts of DF's internal menu logic -- is ugly beyond the point of feasibility.

We probably need an opinion from someone who's worked on DF memory hacking, although I'm not sure any of them ever attempted to analyze menu states.

That mockup is money, though.

[Idiom]

Though Toady doesn't want to work with third party for improving the game, it appears he may be slowly forced to if these kind of user advancements continue. Seriously. He might just consider scrapping the display on his end entirely and just have it crunch the numbers to be interpreted by third party displays.

[LegoLord]

Or go Syler on them like he did with Regional Prospector.

[Ampersand]

I doubt that would ever happen. Toady doesn't want to become dependent on a third party to do any specific part of the game, which is why he doesn't want to work with anyone, but I don't think that he's specifically against third parties doing this sort of thing just because they feel like it.

[Solifuge]

Z-Level 4 and Cutaway
Z-Level 3 and Cutaway
Z-Level 2 and Cutaway
Z-Level 1 and Cutaway
Rotating the Map 90° for Visibility

[Footkerchief]

Good lord that is beautiful.  It would be really hard to make ramps and stairs look that good though.

[Solifuge]

Good lord that is beautiful.  It would be really hard to make ramps and stairs look that good though.

Thanks for the compliment! On the note of ramps and stairs, I don't see making them respect local terrain being that hard... besides, a lot of 3D engines already take ramp direction into account, and stairs are a logical extension.

The thing I'm having trouble with is how to properly represent half-completed Staircases, and showing Up-Down Stairs. I wish Toady had just simplified them into a single "Stairs" object as with Ramps, rather than the whole 2-part thing, where Down Stairs act as a Floor, and Up Stairs act as a Tile.

[Vattic]

Ah fantastic no need for me to make some mock-ups describing what I meant. I will be interested to see how this progresses.

One of the 3D fortress viewers used a spiral staircase for the x designation, an alternative is to cut the stairs in two, so you can see stairs going down and going up, you'd have to get the renderer to change any < or > stairs that connect to a x to display half versions of < and >. Hope you see how I mean.

I made a very quick edit to one of your images to give you the gist, I apologise beforehand for its sloppiness.



So basically:

Code: [Select]

¬
 ¬
  ¬
───
  ⌐
 ⌐
⌐
All on one tile. It's one possible solution anyway.

[MrWiggles]

This does look great.

What color pallet are you sticking to?

Is orthoclose and gold still going to be interchangeable?

[Ampersand]

Honestly, I'd be happy with the color palette used in the mock ups. The problem with 3D viewers is always going to be that they're never going to look great from -every- angle. At least with the Isometric method, everything will look exactly as it's meant to from a given rotation.

[Footkerchief]

Honestly, I'd be happy with the color palette used in the mock ups. The problem with 3D viewers is always going to be that they're never going to look great from -every- angle. At least with the Isometric method, everything will look exactly as it's meant to from a given rotation.

Yeah.  Plus, I would hope this viewer would include the ability to read PNGs for its own isometric tiles (i.e. allow custom isometric tilesets), as well as scan DF's graphics folder to snag creature graphics.

[Ampersand]

That would be absolutely incredible, and absolutely possible.

[Errol]

Just posting to say that this topic brought me to an entirely different task. So, I open the DF.exe with a hexviewer to see whether, by chance, the code is still legible... no chance. I do, however, see the menu strings and stuff.

Now I'm currently translating Dwarf Fortress to German. It will probably be ugly and is most definitely a shitload of hard work. But it's getting done =)