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[Footkerchief]

Although due to the way the game works, you can only show 265^0.5 colors.

16 colors huh? Not that much

Yeah:

Will the next version display proper material colors for all items?  In last year's raws preview, mineral raws still had a DISPLAY_COLOR tag, but that seems seriously obsolete.  I did find a dev log reference (several weeks before the preview) to "color/symbol stuff for items/buildings made from materials," so I'm not sure what the deal is.

I don't get "proper" here.  Do you mean RGB colors?  The stuff being fed through the grid system rather than the creature tile system is still heavily constrained.  I don't expect that to be handled until item display gets decoupled from the font tiles.  If you mean using the 16 color approximation to the RGB material color, then it should use that for items.  Minerals can still be weird because when they are a wall, you can't rely on the material's color, as background colors come up.

[nenjin]

I guess I'm just kind of shaken by Mike Mayday's decision, along with thinking about the wheelbarrows full of new content in this release that tilesets would like to represent. I started DF with Mayday and his is one of the pillars of the Tileset scene. So when he's reached the point where he feels like he can't keep working around the problem, it makes us graphical folks all angsty.

[Owlbread]

I guess I'm just kind of shaken by Mike Mayday's decision, along with thinking about the wheelbarrows full of new content in this release that tilesets would like to represent. I started DF with Mayday and his is one of the pillars of the Tileset scene. So when he's reached the point where he feels like he can't keep working around the problem, it makes us graphical folks all angsty.

I don't really enjoy DF without the graphical mods. I'm shameless in admitting that to me, vanilla DF looks like someone has vomited alphabet soup everywhere. Has Mr. Mayday completely given up or is he just shifting his format to something slightly different?

[Footkerchief]

So when he's reached the point where he feels like he can't keep working around the problem, it makes us graphical folks all angsty.

I think he's partly doing it to draw awareness to the fact that graphics support is long overdue.  All of the ESV items have been slipping for years:

Jan 2009:

In any case, the idea for the release *after* this next release is going to be to tackle one of the main army issues (improved sieges or sending out armies) as well as to take honest stabs at the top 10 or so entries from eternal suggestions (farming is currently among them), and there will probably be another item or two from dev_next that isn't from the Army Arc, though what we want to do from among those constantly shifts.

Sept 2009:

After this release, the next series of shorter releases will be made up of, in no set order:
1) Improved sieges against your fortress
2) Adventurer skills/entity stuff, per the dev next stuff
3) Eternal suggestions voting stuff

[nenjin]

Has Mr. Mayday completely given up or is he just shifting his format to something slightly different?

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=99660.0

I don't have the original, I believe it's on his blog. Basically a tiles lite version, with only creatures and a few key note tiles like walls remaining, the rest in ASCII.

[YetAnotherStupidDorf]

I get feeling that players here send strong hints to Toady about what feature creep should be done for release 2... Proper handling of graphical tiles would be nice. Very nice. Of course, this would require at least partial RAW-ification of currently hardcoded equipment and other things.

About his cite, I do not see any problem. Toady do not have to support thrid-party tileset.

For example, gender symbol versus bag. In ASCII they are represent by same symbol. In vanilia DF just have tileset where there are two places, both with picture of same graphical symbol. Thrid party tileset artist will draw different things in these two places, but ASCII folks will see what they know and love - ♂ symbol.

[Comatose]

Hello,
I found Dwarf Fortress in December 2010, and I am really glad to have found the Bay 12.
I am anticipating the new release, and especially the remainder of the Caravan Arc.
The Bay 12 is a great collective people, and I am happy to be a member.
Keep up the great work Toady, I enjoy the daily devlogs!

[Zahariel]

Now that the bodies of dead adventurers remain as objects in the world, ThreeToe mentioned that you can do a dwarf-mode embark over your adventurer's shallow grave and take his stuff. Given this, will dead adventurers rise as ghosts and hassle your dwarves? And if so, can the dwarves carve the adventurer a slab to make him knock it off? Second question presumably related to the current bug with dead (and still annoying) merchants, I suppose.

[Footkerchief]

Proper handling of graphical tiles would be nice. Very nice. Of course, this would require at least partial RAW-ification of currently hardcoded equipment and other things.

Equipment already has the first step -- some item types are hardcoded and some are in the raws, but they all have item tokens.  However, map tiles (on the main Fort/Adv display, the embark map, travel maps etc.) and random ASII interface elements (==== dividers) are totally hardcoded with no tokens.

[orius]

No real need.  There's already a ton of cash in adventure mode and not much to spend it on.  At least needing food will help drain off some of that cash.

The new shops will give us better a better ability to spend money too. Probably not enough that we'll covet coinage, but it should help a bit. Once we get sites and livestock become available we'll have a boundless cash-sink to boot. We can be ranchers.

Money changers would be a good addition to the cities.  I have an adventurer loaded down with loose change and big stacks of all sorts of random coinage.  A money changer could be useful in say taking those big stacks of copper coins [3000] and giving you back an equvalent amount of gold which takes up less space and weight.  Or exchanging coinage from other civiliaztions at a better rate than the shops.

[Cruxador]

Sept 2009:

After this release, the next series of shorter releases will be made up of, in no set order:
1) Improved sieges against your fortress
2) Adventurer skills/entity stuff, per the dev next stuff
3) Eternal suggestions voting stuff

He said "in no particular order". Apparently the order is gonna be 2-1-3.

[YetAnotherStupidDorf]

At this rate, unsurprisingly no eternal suggestion voting stuff will be done, like, ever.

[rex mortis]

Traditionally, I am a big supporter of the extended ASCII display. It looks good, the tiles are small enough and characters look different enough. The three critical features no graphics set to date has. Examining an unknown object is a minor issue. And anything frequent or important will be memorised quickly.

However, as previously linked, Toady has run out of characters. Adding more will remove one of the biggest advantages ASCII display has, the limited number of characters to remember and recognise. I am not too thrilled about the alternative though.

Graphics sets have huge issues with tile size. With too small tiles one cannot convey even as much information as the ASCII set does. But not all of us have wide screen full HD televisions to display the game on. And the two overlap. A 16^2 tile is both too small and too large at the same time. Some of the monitor area could be recovered if the map display was disassociated from the menus which are fine with the default curses font.

[Neonivek]

Well rex mortis the problem that is starting to happen is that tiles AND colors are starting to be shared with VERY important differences between them.

Plus with some randomised creatures it would be interesting to have a randomised tile too.

[tps12]

Well... There goes a few of my friends... Dang!

Kind of harsh dumping your friends just because they give up Dwarf Fortress.