I can live with my square rooms being square on the main map/tile display (That is actually cool and something I was going to look into in the future). I do prefer
bigger, as that makes it easy on the eyes, allowing me to stuff a 3 day weekend full of Dwarf Fortress with a few breaks for sleep and food. But it was the TEXT and TEXT INTERFACE stopping short and being so screwed up due to squashing that is the problem. My text LITERALLY looks like bits of spiderweb due to the text characters in the MENUS and everywhere ELSE being squeezed down. I finally was desperate enough to enable True Type Fonts, and that stopped the game from turning an E into something resembling a small web. Then my textual information was simply
TINY.
Currently, ALL text body and text interface stop at a little over 40% of the actual height of my screen (note: the main map display window does not. It fills the entire volume). With font resolutions being literally very tiny, it makes for very challenging reading of any text in the game. The map display is fine... the text is not.
I'll try swapping out the text tile set for the old stretched, and see if the text interface goes back to full screen and text bodies become clear, readable, and similar sized to the map text tiles again. The True Type fonts let me play DF now for about 2 hours before its just too much straining to make out what is what--- compared to the prior situation which made it 1 hour max.
Also, I want to thank smjjames, TomiTapio, Rexfelum, Toady One, and Sizik for their help on this. Graphic problems always suck, and are often the hardest things to help with.
Ah, yeah, the old size was reported as a bug, and I thought the tile loader handled it now, so I changed it, and it looked fine for me, so I thought it was okay. Apparently that has broken it for other people now... I'm not sure what the ideal solution is, since it seems broken for one group or another, but stretching your curses_800x600.png file 100% in the vertical direction (or using the large one from .14 or earlier) should solve new graphics problems at that resolution. I vaguely recall having a conversation with Baughn about this a long time ago, but I thought it was a resolved issue.
Toady, from what I am seeing, the tile loader is setting the height for ALL of the GAME TEXT and that's making my game think the interface only has 40-50% of the space it is actually using, and "squashing" the actual text itself. I realize graphics are a nasty thing as each driver wants to do its own thing, but this is where my issue with the display is. I can survive "small tiles" on my main map display--- that just makes it hard to see the difference between * and ☼ characters (they look effectively the same now on the main map display). But having tiny text menus and textual info--- that just drains the fun, stamina, and life out of me. Seems like you started with "night" creatures a bit early.
I realize that being an ascii tile game, map tile resolution and "normal text" sharing the same size is not unexpected, but it seems like there's some adjustment out of sorts between the main map window and the menu control windows and whatever that adjustment is, the menu windows and "normal" text are now being unnecessarily shrunk.
Yakui, I'm going to change out the text tile set and see if that fixes my issues. If so, I'll report back in a day or so here that it worked. Seems like it probably should if that was what changed in 0.31.15 and that's where this started for you. (I skipped from 14 to 16 as I've said before.)