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[Mike Mayday]

vorpal: I'd think that if money was a driving factor for Toady's decisions on the direction of development, he'd have made a proper interface and graphics support ages ago.

Add support in the game for 1 image = 1 building. This will allow artists to draw a single image for a 3x3 workshop, that will cover 9 in-game tiles. (Workshops made of multiple small symbols in ASCII work ok-ish because there's little visual clutter. Enter tilesets, where you're squinting at the tiny details of thousands of small icons: workshops are even uglier and confusing to look at.)[/li][/list]

It really doesn't make any visual difference at all if a workshop image is comprised of a single 48x48 sprite or 9 16x16 sprites. The only difference is the amount of work required to assign the images. Therefore I'd say this suggestion (although nice) is definitely not part of the absolute minimum. I'd like a floor+item display a hundred times more.

[isitanos]

It really doesn't make any visual difference at all if a workshop image is comprised of a single 48x48 sprite or 9 16x16 sprites. The only difference is the amount of work required to assign the images. Therefore I'd say this suggestion (although nice) is definitely not part of the absolute minimum. I'd like a floor+item display a hundred times more.

Hmm right, I agree that if you can assign 9 absolutely arbitrary images to the workshop, it makes no difference to a single sprite except that you have to split it up after drawing it and assign the parts individually.

[vorpal+5]

As a developer myself (in databases though, but I do some pet projects on games), I don't understand why Toady did code to support basically an infinite number of creatures sprites, yet not finish the work (that in my estimate should not be more than a few hours, even less of work) to provide full support for items sprites. There is just an indirection to do in a function, and that's almost done, if he programs the object oriented programming way.

This would please hundreds of people, no doubts, and would not prevent people preferring ASCII to continue playing as before. So why not best of both worlds, given the small amount of work (unless the program is done in a way I can't imagine) involved.

[isitanos]

I suspect it's mainly because he doesn't feel like it. I know, that sucks. One reason for not feeling like it might be that if he does graphic support he wants to go all the way, not only do basic support. He often turns feature requests into huge systems, like what happened with the new, somewhat controversial military interface.

He may also think it could slow him down when adding new features, but I don't see how as he could keep using ASCII symbols for fast development, and leave to modders the task of assigning tiles to every object.

[Mike Mayday]

Yeah, I'm currently helping make a full-graphics visualizer for DF and it's NOT that simple. At the very least, you have to consider categories, materials etc. Otherwise the tileset creators would have to assign graphics to each one of the millions of possible objects separately.

All in all, I believe FGS would be something Toady would have to pay at least SOME attention to if he implemented it. And after the fiasco of Armok1, I'd find it understandable if it was one of the main reasons of postponing FGS.