Bay 12 Games Forum

Dwarf Fortress => DF Modding => Tilesets and Graphics => Topic started by: PopTart on May 08, 2016, 09:09:05 pm

Title: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 08, 2016, 09:09:05 pm
FnordSet contributes a bold Roman font that takes advantage of the square tile. Baskerville served as the main model. This set was also inspired by (and borrows from) the bold geometry of Rogue Yun's Simple Mood and the seriffed grace of the Duerer set. It also draws inspiration from the Ishmeria tileset, which I think complements it nicely as text in TWBT. (Nowadays I use the nicely contrasting sans serif tileset Jecfox for the text font.)

(https://i.imgur.com/0R47xQ5.png)

In d_init.txt, I like to make the 1/2 symbol (171) stand for branches, and the # symbol stand for twigs. Also, the tree trunks are changed to symbol 10.

Here's a custom color set, which is visible in the screenshots:
Spoiler: colors.txt (click to show/hide)

Screenshots, up to date:
Spoiler: Outdoors. Note the branches. (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Tavern (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Bedroom/Tomb (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Library/Temple (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Shops/Stores (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: Deon on May 09, 2016, 02:23:18 am
I do like floors and the walls a lot!
It is always refreshing to see a new tileset. Thank you for sharing. This really looks cool.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 09, 2016, 12:32:39 pm
I should mention that the smoothed/engraved floor (plus sign) is borrowed from Lemunde's Textured Grid set which is based on Simple Mood. Not sure if Lemunde invented or borrowed their plus sign. It's ingenious because the engraved floor tile shows extra bits that are invisible in the basic smooth tile.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 10, 2016, 12:06:17 am
Quote from: Deon on May 09, 2016, 02:23:18 am
It is always refreshing to see a new tileset.

I'm surprised how few tilesets have been shared here. Would love to see more. I was shy about sharing this one, but then I realized it's no big deal! It's no Ironhand but who cares.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: Teneb on May 10, 2016, 04:54:33 pm
Oh, an ASCII-esque tileset. That's always cool (mostly due to my dislike of tilesets in general). The bolding adds a really nice effect. Fnord
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: carnivorn on May 17, 2016, 03:36:19 pm
I gotta say, this is a really attractive tileset! It's got a nice solid, smooth look to it, and gives an overall great first impression. I hope you don't mind if I nitpick and gush at the same time, I'll try to keep it short. Also keep in mind I'm not sure how much of this is pure Baskerville font, and how much has been edited or created by you. Mostly it's about your aesthetic choices rather than pixel-art skill anyways.

To start with, I like what you did with the heart, diamond, club, and spade. It gives them a nice "old deck of cards" feel, which I think goes well with your font choice. The ☼ is also really nice. Your lines have a good balance of tapered and untapered (looking at the <, >, ^, and numbers mostly) and I like the log tile a LOT.
I think your asterisk is too different from the ☼ though - powered mechanisms alternate between the two. Actually, the asterisk just feels out of place in general. The infinity sign could use some smoothing, and, to be super nitpicky, the small 't' would look better one pixel to the left. It's technically centered where it is, but because the crossbar and the curve at the bottom are both more to the right, it looks lopsided (i warned you i was nitpicky, im sorry). I'm curious why you inverted the division symbol? Also I think personally I would also change the trunks of "cap" type trees to the pillar tile (in your last screenshot they show up as O's). I really like the inversion of the cent symbol tile, it makes the hatch covers look great. Your walls, ESPECIALLY your rough walls, are very attractive as well. The patterns in the rough walls remind me of the old ms-dos games i grew up on, and gives them more visual interest without being distracting.

Overall, it's a really good looking tileset and I will probably end up playtesting it even though 16x16 is too big for me. I think my favourite parts of this are the card suits, font choice, and rough walls. Most of my nitpicking is fairly insignificant, I just know they would bug me while playing. I think it's a 9/10 for me? Great work, and thank you for sharing it! ...Sorry for the textdump :'D
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 17, 2016, 04:48:17 pm
Carnivorn, I appreciate your gushings/critiques/nitpicks. They are exactly the most helpful at this stage, and I can always use more. I have no illusions about my pixel-art skill.

I wish I could take credit for the heart, diamond, club, and spade, but they are straight-up ripped off of the Duerer set. They are perfect. The rough walls are borrowed from Rogue Yun's Simple Mood set. Armok knows how many hours they spent pixel-tweaking them. My real contribution and labor are in the Latin and Greek letters, which I'm glad you like!

I have super mixed feelings about the asterisk. Baskerville (which served as a loose model, really) has a wonderful 5-pointed asterisk that I was desperate to work into the 16x16 box. So I incorporated some alpha-shading to get it to resemble the model, but you're right that it sticks out. Maybe I'll adjust the pixels and change to 100% white. And yeah, the ultimate test will be the powered mechanism.

It seems to be a convention to invert the division sign so that barrels appear with a brown foreground and black background. In other words, to see the sign itself as the barrel. Maybe it would be better to de-invert the division sign, so that the square space is the brown barrel and the division sign is the black markings, like on the bin. Then I can shrink the dots, which look too big to me (even though they match the punctuation dots).

I'm still working on the smooth walls 1. preserving the old MS-DOS feel 2. matching the set's line weight variation and 3. providing some negative space. It's a tough balance.

Thanks!
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: Max™ on May 17, 2016, 06:11:41 pm
I scaled this up and massaged it to clean up the errors from the scaling, I spent a lot of time on it but ultimately moved on to other sets, though I still love it. If there's anything you'd like to gank from it or scale down to square or whatnot, rock on.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I reconstructed the X from pieces of the other letters, plus a couple of other tiles like the coffin I think? Not sure how useful it will be because it's huge and NonSquare, but hey.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 18, 2016, 02:19:06 am
The diamond pattern on the engraved tile is sweet, so I'll probably grab that! I wish my screen could display more than 20 lines of it...
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: Max™ on May 18, 2016, 02:35:38 am
That's actually the default duerer one, I just upped the contrast on it, and yeah. They posted a test of a 30x30 map set that I have somewhere so I used it to make the 30x45 and then cleaned up a lot of the scaling errors and swapped in the Bisasam style dorfs, it looks a lot like Fnord actually with that duerer base + those dorfs.

Later I learned how to rescale better and how to repair errors easier than by hand pixel by pixel.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 18, 2016, 12:14:04 pm
I've been meaning to say this for a while... Max, your rescalings are top-notch, they almost make me want to play non-square. I don't know how you do it, how you "clean up the scaling errors" so perfectly. What do you think of these algorithms, like this one (http://johanneskopf.de/publications/pixelart/)?

I will say, though, that something gets lost in the 30x30 or 30x45 versions compared to the original Duerer. The perfect economy of pixels in the 15x15. It fits like a glove. Simple Mood has that feeling too, like their creators didn't invent, but rather discovered, the tilesets.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: Max™ on May 18, 2016, 11:49:49 pm
That algorithm is magic and I have no idea how to make GIMP do it. I had to play with them by hand, and some of them I'm still not happy with, but thanks. It got easier when I figurd out how to predict where errors would show up. With the duerer 30x45 I had to do a lot of reconstruction by inserting undamaged parts of the crosshatch background before I was happy with it.

I just can't do a set as small as 15x15 in adventurer mode, which is where I think nonsquare shines the most, and yeah, simple mood, duerer, taffer, they all have a great aesthetic to them.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: jecowa on May 19, 2016, 12:39:04 am
So I should find these six lines in "data/init/d_init.txt":

Code: [Select]
[TREE_BRANCHES:172]
[TREE_BRANCHES_DEAD:172]
…
[TREE_TRUNK_PILLAR:'O']
[TREE_TRUNK_PILLAR_DEAD:'O']
…
[TREE_TWIGS:';']
[TREE_TWIGS_DEAD:';']
And edit them so that they look like this:?

Code: [Select]
[TREE_BRANCHES:171]
[TREE_BRANCHES_DEAD:171]
…
[TREE_TRUNK_PILLAR:10]
[TREE_TRUNK_PILLAR_DEAD:10]
…
[TREE_TWIGS:'#']
[TREE_TWIGS_DEAD:'#']
Here's an example of the trees with these settings:
Spoiler: "Comparison of trees with vanilla and PopTart's d_init.txt settings (click to show/hide)

Also, here's the color palette mentioned by PopTart for anyone else looking for it:
Spoiler: "Lee's Colour scheme version 1: earthy/natural" (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 19, 2016, 01:07:05 am
Quote from: jecowa on May 19, 2016, 12:39:04 am
So I should find these six lines in "data/init/d_init.txt":

And edit them so that they look like this?

That's correct, that's what I was going for, although still experimenting with alternative tiles for trees in d_init.txt. Another possibility is to set the TREE_TWIGS to 172 (the 1/4 sign).

Time to clarify the OP...
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: jecowa on May 19, 2016, 01:33:12 am
I think the ¼ and ½ look too similar. It makes it look kind of flat when both are used together.
Spoiler: "¼ and ½ twigs and branches" (click to show/hide)

If you make the ¼ symbols the twigs, then maybe the # sign could be the branches? That might look a little better than having the ½ sign as branches with the # sign as twigs.
Spoiler: "# as branches vs # as twigs" (click to show/hide)

Edit: One more comparison – # branches on both, left using ¼ twigs and right using ½ twigs
Spoiler: "¼ vs ½ as twigs" (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: jecowa on May 30, 2016, 04:58:06 pm
So many ninja updates here.
It's okay to include this tileset in noob packs, right?
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 30, 2016, 05:02:00 pm
Yeah, I have bad discipline when it comes to version control. I'm probably not going to update it for a while, so it's safe to add to a Newb Pack. Permission granted!
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on May 30, 2016, 05:03:24 pm
Although, now that I look at that epsilon, the top curve is a little too thick... Ah! It's fine. It's fine. It can stay for now.  ::)
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: RoguelikeRazuka on June 03, 2016, 05:13:54 am
Hey this is awesome! I like the colour scheme very much, it's rather calm and not pale at the same time. Also, as it was mentioned here earlier, floors and walls look great, fitting the rest very well. I hope I can play DF in fullscreen safely now not hurting my eyes.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on June 03, 2016, 02:56:01 pm
Hey thanks! I am currently working on a graphic set using expanded alphabets.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Currently, I'm using the Greek letters to stand for the various professions for humans, elves, and goblins. Hopefully it won't be too much...

If someone steals this idea and uses expanded alphabets to turn their tileset into a graphic set, that is totally cool.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: King_of_Baboons on June 11, 2016, 03:04:21 pm
Any ETA on that download link?I want to try this out  ;D
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on June 11, 2016, 08:52:29 pm
No ETA for the foreseeable future... But one way to speed it along is to help me think of a scheme for matching these crazy glyphs to game creatures. Right now, I have various z's standing for snakes: one glyph for harmless ones, one for venomous, one for constricting... I'm leaving livestock with the default letters. All those Greek alphas become various fish. Any other ideas?
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: King_of_Baboons on June 12, 2016, 01:15:49 pm
I don't play DF with ascii tilesets that much but I guess you could use the Ξ as that vampire indicator thing when you spot one instead of the ñ because it looks like a vampire mouth in that font.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: jecowa on July 28, 2016, 09:53:53 pm
I miss all the ninja updates. Every time I update a LNP I download the latest version of FnordSet and check every byte to see if it's the same as what I have. It always is. I remember when this used to update multiple times a day.
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on July 29, 2016, 12:52:09 pm
Quote from: jecowa on July 28, 2016, 09:53:53 pm
I miss all the ninja updates. Every time I update a LNP I download the latest version of FnordSet and check every byte to see if it's the same as what I have. It always is. I remember when this used to update multiple times a day.

Awww... shucks. I miss obsessively tweaking it. I had done some edits (bridges, the italic f) without updating! So that's been fixed.

Still no ETA on the graphic set... happy to pass the torch on this
Title: Re: FnordSet - a bold choice
Post by: PopTart on June 24, 2017, 12:36:24 pm
Tileset and screenshots are back in the OP.