Ability to place engravings. I'd like to be able to make an engraved block out of an ordinary block, and have it be used for anything an ordinary block could be used for. If it's used for certain things, floors and walls at minimum, it should look like an engraving. The reason I want this is because any large room is going to be speckled with odd colors and I want to be able to design things to more nearly satisfy my sense of beauty.
More flexibility over colors and tiles. The 16-color limit's kickin' my ass, and I don't mean that in a good way. The 256-tile limit's doing the same. "Overloading" single tiles, such as obliging the capital O character to serve as everything from the letter, a pillar, an engraved pillar, the end of a wall (in certain configurations), the end of an engraved wall (ditto), parts of the Depot, and Armok help me glass portals as well is gonna put me in a padded room with a nice hot lever one of these days!
Ability to paint both primary and highlight color in any tile. This involves two steps:
1) Allowing all objects to show both primary and secondary colors (at present, most furniture doesn't allow the the display of the secondary color).
2) Using tileset information to show both colors. There are really easy ways to make this possible. One way is to set up a rule that, in the tileset files in the data\art directory (but not the artwork image files in the raw\graphics directory), any pixel with Red gets tinted with the primary color and any pixel with Blue gets tinted with the secondary color (we avoid green unless necessary for a third color because of red-green color-blindness). If you have a tile pixel that's RGB (255,0,0) and the primary color is (127, 127, 127) (medium grey), than that pixel will be drawn as (127, 127, 127). If you have a tile pixel that's RGB (160,0,160), the primary color is (127, 127, 127) (medium grey), and the secondary color is (0, 0, 255) (light blue), than that pixel will be drawn as (80, 80, 120), a bluish-grey hue suitable for slate.
It will be dirt simple to adjust the existing tilesets. Just change all white to red and all magenta to either blue (if you want a highlight color), or black (if you don't).
Equation: X-value on screen =
(((primary color X-value) * (tile pixel red-value) / (255)) +
((secondary color X-value) * (tile pixel blue-value) / (255)))
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Rebalanced and more editable material requirements for metal objects. Metal is a scarce, mostly non-renewable resource; unbalances here get in my way in ways that unbalanced cloth requirements don't. It should not be the case that 3 bars get you 1 anvil (base value 100), 9 goblets (base value 90), 6 boots (base value 60), 3 buckets (base value 30), or 1 throne (base value 10). A given amount of metal, and a given amount of labor, should yield at least roughly the same value. I'd like to see goblets have a base value of 6 (primarily a trade item), flasks 9 (trade item, now equal in value to goblets), boots 5 (not primarily a trade item), anvils 100, buckets 10, and most furniture other than statues to require only one bar and be worth 10. Statues could require 1 stone/bar and lots of time to make, or 2 stone or 2 bars and only a little more time to make, and still be worth 25.
A rethink of craftmaking speed and workshop clutter. At present, skilled dwarves work incredibly quickly. Workshops rapidly become cluttered, and clutter requires a significant amount of micromanagement first to keep tabs on and then to sort out. Either you have to maintain an efficient haulage cycle (no easy task if you have other tasks that need doing), or you have to keep replacing the workshops. None of this makes gameplay sense. I propose that the time required for a legendary dwarf to make anything be increased about four-fold, that required for dabbling dwarves to be unchanged, and the time required at other skill levels to be increased in linear progression. I further propose that either workshops never become cluttered, or that craftdwarves themselves dump the product immediately outside the shop.
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Topic: Dear Toady. All I want for Christmas is... (DF requests) (Read 1543 times)