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That's right

That is right

[Footkerchief]

I must implore you to review what I've actually said to review whether you actually have a disagreement with me or not, since my impression from your responses has been fairly consistent that you do not actually disagree with the fundamental point I'm making.

Okay:

aligning everything's head, shoulders, chest, hips, and feet in the same way on the same axis ... a bad design principle ... giving a false and disjointed feel to your fortress

There's something specific I disagree with.  That's okay, we're allowed to have different viewpoints on aesthetic issues.  The other thing I disagree with is your attitude that you're "advocating a better way," apparently "better" in some objective sense since you're convinced everyone else should agree with you.

Maybe I'm poorly communicating the point, but I suspect it's more that I'm coming across as excessively critical.

Conciseness would be good.

[ank]

Holy Carp Jadael!

are you on meth or something? how did you make that set so fast?

Awesome!

i vote for Jadael as art guy, that way art will be done by next friday

[soup]

I'm not saying nobody should make sprites like Beefmo's, I think they're lovely. Nor am I even advocating a non-isometric sprite system. I am defending such a system, since several people have criticized the fact that most artists have submitted non-isometric sprites, but I'm also arguing that you can still use an isometric system without looking to Super Mario RPG and Tactics Ogre idling stances for your isometric poses, which I submit is a bad idea no matter what angle you prefer to look at your sprites from. I don't wish to insult Jadael and Xandrin here, mind -- I truly adore Jadael's 3D dwarves based on the Super Mario RPG style (I'm just very strongly arguing that this style is inappropriate for actual use), and Xandrin was suggesting Tactics Ogre with the idea of having multiple facings and walk animations, not with the intent of just using a single facing's idle frame to represent the entire unit.

I think I should clarify my use of the word iconic, since I apparently gave the impression that I meant it as a synonym for 2D. I'm actually saying that both 2D and isometric sprites should have an iconic quality. They should be memorable and symbolic, interesting and representative. Deon's mayor, for example, has an upturned hand, and a large mouth, as if she's speaking and gesturing. Those are what I mean by iconic elements in pose and expression.

They should not imply a specificity that does not exist.

This is a great-sounding principle but it falls flat pretty fast when you examine it.  Does DF specify the style of the breastplates, the height of the grass, the texture of a wall, or the length of a sword?  No.  Does that mean that artists shouldn't depict these things for fear of making an invalid implication?  Of course not.  The point of a visualizer is not only to depict the details that DF does contain, but fill in the details on which it's silent.

Taken literally and to an absurd extreme, you're certainly right, but you are misinterpreting my point by a fair distance when taking it that far. Aligning all your dwarves to have a southeast facing is not just adding details -- it is like making every workshop in your visualizer look like it's made out of microcline and justifying it by saying you don't know what material the workshop is really made out of. If you don't know what material it's made out of, sketch in the details and use a generic gray rock without specifying with such precision as to jar the viewer with the degree of its inaccuracy. If you don't have sprites for every type of tree, better to make your generic tree sprite look like an oak than a willow. I know my dwarf travelling to the north is not facing to the east -- so why is your sprite so overwhelmingly dead set on convincing me otherwise? The purpose of a visualizer is not to contradict what I already know about my fortress, and it should avoid doing so.

As I said in the post you are quoting, there's a big difference between having a character look into the right and aligning everything's head, shoulders, chest, hips, and feet in the same way on the same axis. One is artistic expression to provide interest and detail to the sprite -- the other uses a bad design principle that will tend to strip away the iconic quality and encourage a literal interpretation of facing, giving a false and disjointed feel to your fortress. Following this guideline and having isometric sprites are not mutually exclusive.

I completely agree with your point Fox, but I think people are generalizing your use of "iconic" as an art method, not an art style.

I think all Fox is trying to say is he doesn't want dwarf fortress to look like dwarf habbo hotel. He wants the poses to be in their respective "action stances", drawn to be appropriate for any situation, weapons raised, and full of energy.

And I agree with him (if that is indeed his point). We want to see dynamic poses; job classes with different personalities, not just different clothes... something that really brings out the essence of the character, whether it be 2.5d (isometric) or 2d.

[CobaltKobold]

anyone got shots of 7c's humans in action? That would be...useful for this.

I meant iconic as the whole holding a scroll for the diplomat thing. That they're in 2d...is less relevant.

[Seuss]

Stonesence is an evolving project.

Things will be re-written, re-drawn, flipped upside-down and tossed in the bin. As long as people are willing and think things could be improved things will change.

Don't fret too much.

[Keita]

Every were look on the internet 1 thing stands out.

Arguing over the internet is less pointless then arguing in real life.

"Oh yer?" I hear you cry "Why don't you do something then?".

I will when GIMP stops being an @ss and lets me do something.

In short, stop arguing, stop spouting your opinion because this is the internet. 97% of the time an argument will either go to flaming or continue and drag others into it in till a mod gets involved and starts waving The Hammer around.

Also I don't think that either side will budge in there ideas. So instead of arguing, post an example of what you think and compare.

...Holy carp did I just write that spontainiusly?

[soup]

Decided to make a variant smaller fox... top is original.

[Deon]

Yeah it's now much more fitting by size (and slim) .

Alsp: run for the hills! Dwarven Druid!

[dreiche2]

It is currently more limited, yes.  That will change, though, if not with Stonesense, then with a future visualizer.  There's a nontrivial chance that facings will become more important in DF itself, too, for LOS purposes, proper stealth, setting polearms as a formation, etc.

Right now it doesn't have "facing", but it has a directional bias that builds up as you attack in a certain direction repeatedly (which then opens you up to attacks).  That will be changed during the combat arc when I add something like a situational awareness skill.  I'm always wary of a strict facing.  I dislike vision cones and having to change direction manually.  It just doesn't seem that realistic, especially if you are in an alert state.  You have a neck to see all around you, which shouldn't take a turn to move and therefore you shouldn't have to control at all, the ability to use a stance that's more complicated than simply pointing in one direction (for example, how you position your legs can help determine whether you are more prone to being knocked over from the front or from the sides), and the ability to walk in all directions, not just the direction your head/body is facing.  On the other hand, you should be able to sneak up being a lazy guard that's facing away from you (rather than just using a magical sneak mode like we've got now).  I was thinking of doing momentum when you can differentiate between running and walking.

Actually, the quote by Toady (emphasis mine) doesn't exactly argue for a strict facing system, does it?

If you guys care for another opinion, I'm tending to agree with Jonathan in principle, although he seems to be a little bit assertive about it. To his defence, while he has a strong opinion about what system is better, he actually only started to make his case after other people asserted that pure isometric is better and should be the style for Stonesense, without further discussion.

So yeah, I don't think people need to get into a big argument here. There's good reasons for both opinions, and I think Jonathan has a good point at least in that pure isometric should not be considered better by default just because it's more 'realistic' (etc.). In the end, it's going to be the creators of Stonesense that have to decide (and obviously, nothing has to be set in stone forever).

Edit: typo

[kaypy]

OK, maybe someone has talked about this in here, but the thread is getting really long.

Rather unnavigable, yes.

Anyway, I can never get past the opening screen in Stonesense.  I mash "F9" over and over again and nothing happens.  I even tried making an AutoHotKey script to send F9, and it seemed to do nothing.  Anyone have any idea why?

Is DF running? If so what version? Does the screen have "Could not find DF" or something on it?

In the end, it's going to be the creators of Stonesense that have to decide (and obviously, nothing has to be set in stone forever).

I think the graphics we want is "All of them"- we need to cope with mods to the underlying DF, so we ought to be able to take swapping graphics styles in our stride 8-)

We're making a big configurability push right now, so hopefully next release it'll be time for people to start organizing these sprites into swappable graphics packs...

[Deon]

Guess who by the number of cloaks and nothing else. One of cloaks is semi-transparent >.>.

[Mike Mayday]

Deon those female dwarves are scary
The male ones are super cool though.

[MMad]

I think Jonathan has a good point at least in that pure isometric should not be considered better by default just because it's more 'realistic' (etc.).

I agree, and I furthermore suspect that if you want to run SS alongside DF in real-time, non-isometric icons would be less jarring, since they wouldn't be moving backwards. However, if you're not planning to run it while playing but only use it to check out the fortress while paused, isometric creatures that seem to fit in the game grid might be less jarring. As with the whole ASCII vs. graphics debate in DF proper, it's probably going to be highly subjective.

At this point, since progress on the SS art will only continue as long as the artists here want to keep working on it, I'd encourage people to just keep doing whatever they feel like doing, in whatever style they want to experiment with. If you end up with a couple of different styles, that might be a good thing - trial and error will decide what works best for the "official"/default style, and anything else could grow into it's own custom thing.

(Of course, if the primary owners of this project want things to progress in a specific direction for now, in order to get a more-or-less coherent base set up and running, now might be a good idea to mention it.

Btw, long-time lurker, first-time poster. This thing is pretty awesome and awesomely pretty. Keep it up.

[Deon]

Deon those female dwarves are scary
The male ones are super cool though.

Scary? There's something wrong with your ego .
What do you mean by "scary"? I tried hard .

And DM was a joke, I plan to make a more serious job later. Also, male ones are only in development, I am making them ISO to be in the same style.

Here's a "real" (not a joke) hammerer, an executioner of your fortress (again, female):


The list of "serious" sprites which I consider to be complete:
Dwarves (female):
- queen
- mayor
- druid (usable in rare case)
- hammerer

- peasant
- hunter
- brewer
- milker
- miner
- stoneworker (mason/engraver)

I plan to finish civillians first, then nobles, then jump on military (not literally ).

[dyze]

I completely agree with your point Fox, but I think people are generalizing your use of "iconic" as an art method, not an art style.

I think all Fox is trying to say is he doesn't want dwarf fortress to look like dwarf habbo hotel. He wants the poses to be in their respective "action stances", drawn to be appropriate for any situation, weapons raised, and full of energy.

And I agree with him (if that is indeed his point). We want to see dynamic poses; job classes with different personalities, not just different clothes... something that really brings out the essence of the character, whether it be 2.5d (isometric) or 2d.

i also agree with fox. even though both the iso and 2d styles in this thread are really nice, imo we need to focus on finishing one coherent tileset first, and we're still a long way from that. personally i think we should go with Nickels style, since its clean and simple, no issues. with iso its so much much more work. even more so now that people have started animating aswell. backsides to every creature...