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[DG]

Various animals root around in the dirt and eat bugs for your viewing pleasure.

The fact that this was specifically noted, along with it being just bugs and not vermin in general, makes me wonder if it's done via HUNTS_VERMIN or something new.

Good question- my personal bet is that it is a new thing, maybe an interaction of some sort. This is based solely on the fact that he mentioned "your viewing pleasure," which leads me to imagine, say, chickens scratching up the grass in a tile. Should be exciting.

I interpreted it as meaning that if you cut open a creatures gizzard you could see what was inside and undigested. The average adventurer on these forums is more likely to derive viewing pleasure from that.

[Knight Otu]

"Gastrolith obligation"? Mang, now I feel guilty mentioning them.

[KillerClowns]

"Gastrolith obligation"? Mang, now I feel guilty mentioning them.

Also, I think that Toady One was the first person in human history to put those two words together in a sentence.

[nenjin]

I'm not entirely certain how to ask this, so I'll leave the lime green off of it.

But with Mike Mayday switching over to an ASCII-based tileset because:

Toady keeps adding new items, objects etc. without support for more symbols for them. Unfortunately, this was making DFG more and more of a mess.

Is there anything reasonable that could be done to help those making graphical tilesets keep up with Toady's development? I know that spending time supporting 3rd party applications, graphics least of all, isn't a road Toady wants to walk down. I'm just trying to get a handle on the issue. Because some tile set makers will be willing to put in the effort, some won't, some things might be out of their reach due to limitations....but anything small that could make their lives easier would be excellent.

[zwei]

Is there anything reasonable that could be done to help those making graphical tilesets keep up with Toady's development? I know that spending time supporting 3rd party applications, graphics least of all, isn't a road Toady wants to walk down. I'm just trying to get a handle on the issue. Because some tile set makers will be willing to put in the effort, some won't, some things might be out of their reach due to limitations....but anything small that could make their lives easier would be excellent.

Other than ability to have more than 256 tiles for enviroment and items, nothing.

Mayday and others are running into problems because they rain into inherent issue of tilesets: some symbols are shared between different object (stair - bin - archery target - status mark - for example). As Toady adds more things that need symbols, it will be more and more problematic to make realistic looking tileset.

He could make those symbols all rawable the same way as creatues graphics are are rawable:

[ITEM:BIN:items.png:25]

[Neonivek]

Well the issue with shops and money is that ToadyOne sort of diminished their use to... well... useless for the most part. Since you can't buy Masterwork in stores (I think) and Masterwork from what people tell me is the only quality that counts, and all the equipment you could ever need is dropped in vast quantities.

For now.

Mind you I can't think of many money sinks that could exist in Dwarf Fortress.

[hermes]

Is there anything reasonable that could be done to help those making graphical tilesets keep up with Toady's development? I know that spending time supporting 3rd party applications, graphics least of all, isn't a road Toady wants to walk down. I'm just trying to get a handle on the issue. Because some tile set makers will be willing to put in the effort, some won't, some things might be out of their reach due to limitations....but anything small that could make their lives easier would be excellent.

Other than ability to have more than 256 tiles for enviroment and items, nothing.

Mayday and others are running into problems because they rain into inherent issue of tilesets: some symbols are shared between different object (stair - bin - archery target - status mark - for example). As Toady adds more things that need symbols, it will be more and more problematic to make realistic looking tileset.

He could make those symbols all rawable the same way as creatues graphics are are rawable:

[ITEM:BIN:items.png:25]

This would all be totally reasonable to expect provided there were no procedurally generated objects or creatures.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that with the new release we might see the beginnings of both these - materials and night creatures.  I think the night creatures might be drawn from a set pattern, as Toady already described the set colourings of each type, but I guess it's possible to expect further randomization in the future?
  i.e. If Toady ever wants to have creatures or materials with random names and appearances, the very idea of a specific graphical tileset becomes quite a tricky thing to handle.

Man the wait is killing me.  I'm considering starting Adventuring in the current release just to get warmed up and reacquainted with the controls.

[nenjin]

I guess it becomes a question of how granular it is. It applies to creatures but it hasn't been done across the vast amount of game content. And committing to keeping updated lists for every possibly displayed thing in DF would probably pose an appreciable large burden, considering it doesn't really yield anything tangible to Toady. He does plenty of that already.

[Knight Otu]

Full graphics support, expanded tile sets, and the like come up quite often, and it's a big vote-getter on the Eternal Suggestions voting. It actually was in the Top Ten at the time Toady compiled the new dev page, but he left it out because he said he'll first need to delve into the new SDL code. However, he also definitely sees the need for adding it at some point, in a "not quite pressing yet, but we kind of are out of tiles" way - there's a bit of it in Dwarf Fortress Talk #10:

Rainseeker:   Because your game is ASCII, and ASCII is probably the most fun graphical representation of a game I've ever played. It's definitely old school ... but I think that the complexity of your game totally overwhelms even noticing it's ASCII after a while. Macbeth asked this interesting question; 'As the project gets more complex do you expect that these ASCII character sets won't be able to support the detail you're adding? What are your plans for displaying that information?'
Toady:   It's already at that point, if you've seen the elves versus elephants or goblins versus goats or whatever issues come up ...
Rainseeker:   'Why are those elephants shooting arrows at me? I don't understand!'
Toady:   And there are methods of getting around that to some extent, but eventually you hit a wall. You saw with world generation recently the human sprawl I went with lines and whatever the letter is called (æ) when you put an 'a' and an 'e' together for the hill farms, and eventually your bag runs out of ... bag stuff ...
Rainseeker:   Tricks.
Toady:   There's no more tricks in the bags, no more little characters in the bag. And so then you hit that point where you're like 'do you just go over to a tileset at that point? Do you experiment with Unicode stuff? If you add just a new IBM codepage r256 grid characters or whatever ...' If we add another grid of characters that look promising and just stick with that, that's kind of counterproductive in a way, because once you jump up beyond 256 you're free to move about the country at that point and go up to 65'000 or millions or whatever the rewrite entails. At the same time there's something to be said for the ASCII mode of the game, which I like because I can develop it quickly and I don't have to ... Zach and I drawing is not the same as other people drawing ... or maybe the problem is it's the same as other people drawing who aren't artists. And we can't use other people's tilesets without worrying about legal business, and more so not just legal business but ongoing development; if we've got a tileset then are there release delays when we wait for new pictures, or if a person drawing a tileset bails do we try and find somebody that can draw in the same style as they do, or does it become some kind of hellish hybrid of different art styles. It's difficult when we don't have an employee that we can employ for several years, or a person who will stick with the project. People stick with the project, like Baughn's been helping us for quite a long time, but what happens? If Baughn leaves, I do have some trouble with linux and mac support and so on, and other people can help with that, and I'm not sure graphics is the same way where someone can just step in and do the exact same thing, although artists are talented and there's probably someone who can do that, but I don't know if I can count on that or not. Then there's the legal question, I don't know how to do that properly; I have to make sure I can find someone I can trust who isn't going to lift a glyph from Nintendo without me noticing. So there're a lot of questions, it's not completely ruled out, but there're a lot of questions. The other method would be just to add another 256 characters if I don't just go with some Unicode font or something. And in a sense there's a charm at least with the vanilla, of adding just another 256 characters, because it's an extension that's required, but it still sticks within the same kind of poetic form. But there's going to be like seven people that agree with that assessment and a whole crapload of people that are like 'what the hell are you thinking?' So we're kind of there in a sense ... not super pressing at least, not anymore pressing than adding graphics to the game always was with running out of characters to display the information. But it's certainly already hit that wall in several places, and it's only filling it out more as time goes on.

[nenjin]

Thanks for the blurbs KO.

[Footkerchief]

Here's a less recent, but more schedule-oriented quote on "Full graphics support":

Regarding the two of the top ten ESV items not specifically addressed on the new page, sped-up pathfinding and graphics support, the idea with the first is an upcoming date with the linux profiler now that we've got DF running over there to address the low-hanging fruit on the main grievance behind the suggestion (large, slow forts).  In the case of supporting tiles for each game object, I need to figure out the deal with all the new SDL code before I can lay anything out in stark terms.  The textures are stored differently (in a single atlas if it still works that way), and I'm not sure if it'll be feasible to move to full item/map texture support without altering the way that works.

Both Knight Otu's quote and mine are from 2010.  It's way overdue to get some attention.

He could make those symbols all rawable the same way as creatues graphics are are rawable:

[ITEM:BIN:items.png:25]

That is roughly what it'd look like, yeah.  It doesn't need anything qualitatively different from the creature graphics support.

This would all be totally reasonable to expect provided there were no procedurally generated objects or creatures.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that with the new release we might see the beginnings of both these - materials and night creatures.  I think the night creatures might be drawn from a set pattern, as Toady already described the set colourings of each type, but I guess it's possible to expect further randomization in the future?
  i.e. If Toady ever wants to have creatures or materials with random names and appearances, the very idea of a specific graphical tileset becomes quite a tricky thing to handle.

The procedural creatures definitely don't lend themselves to simple graphics support, but vanilla DF will always have stock creatures, probably as a solid majority of the creatures in the game.

Procedurally generated item types would have similar problems, but AFAIK the game doesn't have any yet.  Procedural materials are fine since the only material attribute that really matters for graphical purposes is the color, which random materials will always have.  That color can be applied to grayscale item graphics (just like the current item glyphs).

[zwei]

The procedural creatures definitely don't lend themselves to simple graphics support, but vanilla DF will always have stock creatures, probably as a solid majority of the creatures in the game.

Procedurally generated item types would have similar problems, but AFAIK the game doesn't have any yet.  Procedural materials are fine since the only material attribute that really matters for graphical purposes is the color, which random materials will always have.  That color can be applied to grayscale item graphics (just like the current item glyphs).

However, proceduraly generated creatures and items have designated meta-tile anyway, so something like this is possible:

[CREATURE_SPECIAL:NIGHT:creatures.png.... etc...

I think people are willing to put up with all of them being ñ or ň or ń or whatever anyway if pipes can look like pipes and beehives look like beehives.

And materials can ideed be shown by just color. Any of 256^3 colors in fact.

[Neonivek]

Wait... Mike Mayday is no longer going to do graphical tilesets? I thought he was talking about how he sometimes uses ASCII over a graphic tile because there was overlap.

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

Ohh well. It may take a few months or years but eventually we will get graphical support

Though even Toady is getting close to the point where he is going to have to find new ways to represent things on screen outside of straight up ASCII.

[Sizik]

And materials can ideed be shown by just color. Any of 256^3 colors in fact.

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

[Neonivek]

And materials can ideed be shown by just color. Any of 256^3 colors in fact.

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

16 colors huh? Not that much