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[Footkerchief]

Will this work with custom tilesets, like Mayday's?  Sorry if someone already asked this. 

If it got implemented by Toady, yes, there's no reason why it wouldn't.

[Shaostoul]

I think it's a really cool idea and would like to see it go some where. The soft change could be removed and it could stay the hard change where it is now. This would be amazing when trying to track units on steep hillsides.

[Baughn]

There's no reason this couldn't be done, but it would be quite hard.

It would take too much CPU time to regenerate such a view per-frame. Instead, the tiles should be pushed on a list when they are changed.. er, for the layperson: It'd require rewriting a fair bit of DF, and completely changing the displa system.

What I'm trying to say is, it'd take probably a week just to get the hooks in, and another month to get it working with the other screens.

[zchris13]

I, personally, am willing to wait years.  BUT I WANT IT. WANT IT SOOO BAD.

[Thursday Postal]

I think it would be worth doing, even if it wasn't able to do animations.. Maybe just buildings and terrain.. It looks very nice and lets you look at the world as a whole, instead of bizarre islands in a sea of sky.

[DarthCloakedDwarf]

This is worth any wait. It is beautiful, I love it, and it covers one of DF's greatest flaws.

[Sir Finkus]

This would fix one of my biggest pet peeves with dwarf fortress.  My current fort is inside of a rather steep mountain and keeping track of things gets very difficult.

[PTTG??]

Hey Nice! I can see my product from here! I work for Telestream! You should buy that to help pay for my paycheck.
Also, I like the look of your demo. I'd love to see that implemented- though I suspect that it's non-trivial.

[CobaltKobold]

well, technically I think it already does SOME of the checks I meant, for sky-height. It's not that bad to implement, but it'd be tough to implement in a way that's speedy

[nodule]

(OP here)

Rainseeker: It absolutely would work with custom tilesets.  I have testing it with Mayday (although the "empty tile" detection doesn't work properly, it's just a hack to get around the fact that I don't have access to the data)

CobaltKobold: if implemented properly, I don't think that this effect would affect the frame rate significantly.  Ultimately, you are drawing exactly the same # of tiles as before (though the tiles drawn might be from different levels).  OpenGL makes the alpha fast.  of course, more tiles that are "active" might have to be drawn, on average.

You could make it just display terrain from different levels, too, which would have essentially no impact. 

Untelligent: I like the transition effect, but would be much more interested in just seeing the main idea implemented.

PTTG: sorry, I just wanted a simple screencap to show off the transitions.  If I did this type of thing more than once, I'd consider buying the program

All: it definitely wouldn't be trivial to implement this in the game.  I looked at the display bindings provided to the opengl speedup build guys, and it seems to be outputting tiles/sprites rather than game data (so no info about other levels could be used).  I'm not sure how hard it would be to change the layer above that to provide more/different data.  If Toady is interested, I'm certainly willing to put in time to try to make it work.

[Baughn]

That's exactly right.

I've talked to Toady about this kind of thing before, but he doesn't seem to be very interested. Mainly because it'd be in the nature of a quick hack, and would need to be rewritten once he gets to the interface arc.

I understand, mostly. We'll probably have to make do for now.

[eerr]

But we can still prod him about it right ?

[Footkerchief]

But we can still prod him about it right ?

The time to prod him is when he starts working through the top 10 items from Eternal Suggestion Voting after the upcoming release, so that he'll do it as part of #4, "Full graphics support."  Until then, don't bother.

[Baughn]

If done wrongly, this could produce a dramatic slowdown in DF; doing it right would be a lot of work.

So don't prod too hard. You don't want a half-assed implementation of this.

[Footkerchief]

doing it right would be a lot of work.

Yeah, I expect it'll take roughly as much effort as isometric, and "Full graphics support" may just end up being obvious stuff like text/graphics decoupling and sprite support for items/vermin/terrain/worldmap.  Incidentally, do you expect performance issues when text's no longer rendered on the grid system?