I really don't care about the default graphics, I prefer seeing little figures of what I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to be fighting or where I'm supposed to be instead of a bunch of random characters, even if that's static.
I mean I just cannot see how a static @ that won't change no matter what happens in battle is better than a static figure of a man holding a sword and a shield that won't change no matter what happens... and for what is worth the sprite for your character does change depending on your skill level and profession, well at least with phoebus it does.
Have you read the arguments on both sides? I feel like I and some others have already pretty much responded to that.
That said I don't have anything against keeping the default graphics the way they are for those that appreciate them and still have to install tilesets separately, if he could makethe process of installing a graphics set more straight forward it would be enough already, like if you could drop a compacted archive containing all the graphics on a folder and then simply enable it ingame.
There are definitely some ways that tileset installation could be made easier. For instance, in order to change tileset assignments (to use, say, unused tiles in the font), tilesets currently have to change the game's raws. This creates problems because the game's object files need to be distributed as well, and changing between tilesets is problematic. Ideally, this should not be the case, and tilesets should be able to
override the raw assignments rather than replace them.
Of course, we have another dimension to use here: Color. When you have different, similar creatures (like all the damn gibbons), color is useful, especially if color support moves beyond the 16-color palette in the future. I might make a suggestion thread regarding how best to handle that in the near future.
I'd rather see color used to distinguish classes of things with very different behavior (for example wild animals, domestic animals, neutral sentients, hostile sentients...) than as just another axis for making creatures with similar names look different. There's no reason all the damn gibbons need visually distinct symbols.*
That's a fair point, but I think the gibbons are something of an extreme example. There are other examples, like the different feline or canine creatures.
It's not really an easy thing to solve. There are many different axes that can be represented, like species, caste, status (the things you just mentioned), whether it's trained as a war or hunting animal (which I kind of solve in my own stupid way in my digraph creatures program), whether it's a zombie or a skeleton or a ghost or what, etc. We don't really have nearly as many visual axes to work with as we have to represent mechanics-wise.
I could see that as an in-game option, though: a "true color" mode that tries to show every creature in the predominant color that it actually is, using 24-bit color and based on the creature's description and what it's wearing and everything (so your squad of guys in red cloaks can actually be red), and then various "false color" modes: color by profession (what we have now), by faction, by health status, by current job, etc. Like the map modes in Europa Universalis, if anyone's played that.
I think it would look very visually noisy and possibly annoying to have different members of a species different colors based on what they're wearing or the color of their skin/fur, but I suppose people might like it.