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[buman]

the highest skill can be displayed as a icon on the dwarf's outer most clothing layer, that way the item he is holding is always displayed. Otherwise you could run into a problem where you forget to switch back your toggle idea and all your marksdwarves are actually holding food rather then the displayed crossbow.

[Impaler[WrG]]

I've always understood Full Graphics support (which I have a vote allocated towards) to mean that the font PNG would be split up.  The current 16x16 file becomes pure font and a separate extensible multiple file based system like that for creatures is used for all none creature objects.  The greyscale/magenta system should be kept though as its extremely effective at colorizing objects.  Definition text files will of course be necessary to link the expanded PNG files to various object types.  I think a modest increase in the colors available to materials would also be good, something like ~100 and to use them by name rather then number would be more convenient.

[Phasma Felis]

I've been playing a simple little roguelike called Wayfarer recently. It's still in alpha, and much, much less complex than DF, but it struck me as a decent example of what Dwarf Fortress graphics might look like, with the goal "represent a 3D world effectively with clear, minimal graphics." Especially note the way Z and X can raise/lower the viewpoint from a strictly overhead-tile view to an almost-first-person view, and how normal sprites change as compared to "flat" things like Slithergadees--I thought that was a nice touch.

(I hope this is the right place for this post. It's a little more abstract than the rest of the thread, but the game really made me think of Dwarf Fortress, and I wanted to mention it here. EDIT: If it should go somewhere else, let me know.)

[Neonivek]

Let me think of possible ways to add onto graphical support

This post is mostly about bulk but I would like to know if I came up with any good ideas.

1) Quality, Embellished, and Quality Embellish: A Barrel could look different then a +Barrel+, though using this for artifacts would be golden.
2) Two, or more, possible colored ranges: Specifically you know how a sword that is gold looks different then one that is silver? What if there were two colors that could be exchanged for different colors. Especially useful for creatures and civilisations. For example Hair and skin could have alternate colors depending on what it gens for it.
3) Injured, Bleeding, Unconscious, On Fire seperation and/or Boarders: By Boarders I mean that if someone is on fire, MAYBE, the square could have flames around it or they could be surrounded by a flame. Ehhh
-Addition: Maybe the skin color of an enemy could change if they go beserk/trance
4) Overworld map Clusters: If there is a 3x3 tile of woodlands, maybe it should be represented by a large cluster of trees rather then 9 seperate trees.

[zwei]

There is also one more thing:

Multi-resolution support.

Map tiles being same resolution as text means that bigger and more quality tiles also mean bigger and more clumsy text that is kinda hard to read comfortably and takes up too much space.

Text tiles and map tiles should be separate and be able to have different resolutions: i.e., having 16x16 tiles for map but 8x8 tiles for text.

[Squirrelloid]

I've been playing a simple little roguelike called Wayfarer recently. It's still in alpha, and much, much less complex than DF, but it struck me as a decent example of what Dwarf Fortress graphics might look like, with the goal "represent a 3D world effectively with clear, minimal graphics." Especially note the way Z and X can raise/lower the viewpoint from a strictly overhead-tile view to an almost-first-person view, and how normal sprites change as compared to "flat" things like Slithergadees--I thought that was a nice touch.

(I hope this is the right place for this post. It's a little more abstract than the rest of the thread, but the game really made me think of Dwarf Fortress, and I wanted to mention it here. EDIT: If it should go somewhere else, let me know.)

Wow, that must be the least informative rogue-like graphics ever.  Even the angband tilesets are more useful than that, and they're still vastly inferior to the ascii.  But that, that is just blobs of crap.

[Phasma Felis]

I've been playing a simple little roguelike called Wayfarer recently. It's still in alpha, and much, much less complex than DF, but it struck me as a decent example of what Dwarf Fortress graphics might look like, with the goal "represent a 3D world effectively with clear, minimal graphics." Especially note the way Z and X can raise/lower the viewpoint from a strictly overhead-tile view to an almost-first-person view, and how normal sprites change as compared to "flat" things like Slithergadees--I thought that was a nice touch.

(I hope this is the right place for this post. It's a little more abstract than the rest of the thread, but the game really made me think of Dwarf Fortress, and I wanted to mention it here. EDIT: If it should go somewhere else, let me know.)

Wow, that must be the least informative rogue-like graphics ever.  Even the angband tilesets are more useful than that, and they're still vastly inferior to the ascii.  But that, that is just blobs of crap.

How you figure? There's not a whole lot in the game yet, but everything there is clearly represented. Obviously DF would need more detailed/less stick-figurey tiles, but the existing tilesets should mostly cover that.

Not sure why you think the Angband tiles are worse than ASCII, for that matter. They do suck in a lot of ways, but at least you can say "that's a sword" or "that's a dragon" most of the time. If you're coming from the viewpoint that ASCII is automatically superior, I'm not really sure why you're reading this thread.

[Squirrelloid]

I've been playing a simple little roguelike called Wayfarer recently. It's still in alpha, and much, much less complex than DF, but it struck me as a decent example of what Dwarf Fortress graphics might look like, with the goal "represent a 3D world effectively with clear, minimal graphics." Especially note the way Z and X can raise/lower the viewpoint from a strictly overhead-tile view to an almost-first-person view, and how normal sprites change as compared to "flat" things like Slithergadees--I thought that was a nice touch.

(I hope this is the right place for this post. It's a little more abstract than the rest of the thread, but the game really made me think of Dwarf Fortress, and I wanted to mention it here. EDIT: If it should go somewhere else, let me know.)

Wow, that must be the least informative rogue-like graphics ever.  Even the angband tilesets are more useful than that, and they're still vastly inferior to the ascii.  But that, that is just blobs of crap.

How you figure? There's not a whole lot in the game yet, but everything there is clearly represented. Obviously DF would need more detailed/less stick-figurey tiles, but the existing tilesets should mostly cover that.

Not sure why you think the Angband tiles are worse than ASCII, for that matter. They do suck in a lot of ways, but at least you can say "that's a sword" or "that's a dragon" most of the time. If you're coming from the viewpoint that ASCII is automatically superior, I'm not really sure why you're reading this thread.

Not automatically superior (for Angband), although the Adam Bolt tiles (which are the ones i've seen) are horribly cramped and thus hard to identify quickly.  I'm not sure how its Dragon tile is easier to say 'that's a dragon' than a 'D' is.  And since the differences between a sword and an axe are mostly irrelevant in the game, ASCII lets you go 'that's a weapon', which is all you really needed to know.  (I'm pretty sure its color-coded by weapon type, but while I care a lot about the difference between a AMHD and a GWoP, I haven't cared about the difference between weapon types and so haven't bothered to remember which color is which.  Mostly i just vaporize them with acid balls looking for the artifacts since those don't melt).

I remain unconvinced graphics could improve on ASCII for DF except for a 3D visualizer (which I wouldn't want to play in, just use to look at megaprojects and the like).  Maybe I keep hoping someone will show off some graphics that doesn't make the dwarves look like refugees from a Disney movie...

[Derakon]

Aside: in Angband, swords, daggers, and other edged weapons are |, hafted weapons like clubs, maces, and quarterstaves are /, and polearms are \ (or maybe I have hafted and polearm reversed).

[Squirrelloid]

Aside: in Angband, swords, daggers, and other edged weapons are |, hafted weapons like clubs, maces, and quarterstaves are /, and polearms are \ (or maybe I have hafted and polearm reversed).

See, I knew it was something like that.  But mostly i just destroy them anyway, so remembering which is which never seems important.

[Draco18s]

Aside: in Angband, swords, daggers, and other edged weapons are |, hafted weapons like clubs, maces, and quarterstaves are /, and polearms are \ (or maybe I have hafted and polearm reversed).

See, I knew it was something like that.  But mostly i just destroy them anyway, so remembering which is which never seems important.

And ) are bows, crossbows, and slings.  I think / is ammunition.
Been a while since I played.
In any case, I think color denoted material.  Brown was wood, gray was metal.
Or.
Something.
In any case, I was like Squirrelloid, only since I didn't wander the dungeons with Acid Balls I didn't melt things.  I just looted the most valuable ones--not that gold was good for anything (one of the main reasons I don't play roguelikes: a 10,000 gold item had a resale value under 500 gold).

[Neonivek]

Ohh and Id like to add

Differing appearances based on material.

Id think a Wood, Stone, and Metal chair would look differently in more ways then color.

[Gazz]

An item I haven't seen here, yet, but which seems quite critical to me:

- different aspect ratios for font tilesets versus graphics tilesets.
Square graphical tiles make it easier to display a pretty fortress but text on square tiles always looks bad.
The "text/number tileset" needs to be rectangular, not square.

[Footkerchief]

An item I haven't seen here, yet, but which seems quite critical to me:

- different aspect ratios for font tilesets versus graphics tilesets.
Square graphical tiles make it easier to display a pretty fortress but text on square tiles always looks bad.
The "text/number tileset" needs to be rectangular, not square.

It was probably omitted because there's a dev item for it:

# Core51, SIZEABLE GAME WINDOW, (Future): Allow the resizing of the game windows, and possibly the support of variable width fonts to allow more text to be displayed.

[NW_Kohaku]

Ohh and Id like to add

Differing appearances based on material.

Id think a Wood, Stone, and Metal chair would look differently in more ways then color.

... That's an interesting idea...  It would lead to more memory usage (because you have to load up more bitmaps), but you could probably do this once you can include an extensible tileset.  (That is, the ability to make more than 255 tiles in a tileset, and assign all symbols to new unique tiles.) 

If you used a "texture" of marble (another bitmap tile for marble), instead of just a pair of colors, and then applied that as the "color" of a marble object, which would then be modified by the transparency of the wall/furniture/craft/whatever tile, you could make all marble objects have a wavy pattern of white and brown, instead of just making marble light grey.