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Topics - spinnylights

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DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Subterranean water encased in above-ground ice
« on: May 21, 2022, 08:41:21 am »
I'm sure I'm not the first person to observe this, but I wasn't finding anything quite about it poking around, so I thought it might be fun to note. If it's freezing cold outside, and you put a screw pump in an interior room pointing out through a hole in the wall and there's an overhang above the hole, the water will come out as liquid below the overhang and then freeze into ice past that, and the ice will encase the water in the "nominally subterranean" environment below the overhang where it's still liquid:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Even if you channel out a small ditch under the pump outlet, the ice covers over it like walls, so it "catches" the subterranean status and the water in it stays liquid too:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I just thought this was fun. Maybe if you made a downward slope with a big overhang over it, the game would treat all of it as below ground, and you could encase things in ice by washing them down the slope with water from the top and letting the water freeze to ice when it gets past the overhang. Does anyone already like to do that? :P

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Tilesets and Graphics / Silverypuzzle — a curses "Unicode remix"
« on: April 11, 2021, 03:01:08 pm »

Like the default IBM VGA tileset? Interested in a little change of pace?

HiDPI
LoDPI
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For a long time now I've been mulling something over. There are many contemporary games that have a curses-style interface, but lots either use purpose-made tiles or a traditional EASCII character set. This seems a bit strange to me considering that Unicode specifies over 140,000 characters to work with and support for it is now widespread. For a solo dev or a tiny team, lots of time could be saved on visuals by using a free font with extensive Unicode coverage for graphics and the game could still look very interesting—I would think. But I didn't have a proof of concept, until it occurred to me that DF would make a rich and convenient test bed.

This is a sort of reimagining of the default tileset. It draws from a variety of places, including Meirotic hieroglyphs, the Apple II's MouseText, and musical and alchemical symbols. I've tried to keep the rough look of the characters close enough to their old-school IBM equivalents as to be recognizable to those accustomed to the default tiles, but fresh enough to feel like a new set of clothes for the game. Many of the tiles I ended up modifying somewhat from their representations in the font, sometimes rather a lot, but I always tried to hold onto an iconographic quality when doing so. I've made an effort to ensure that each tile works well (at least to me) in all its different uses; for instance, the right-facing ballista arrowhead looks somewhat different from the left-facing one so it can also be a good manta ray (aside from providing simple variety).

Samples:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Latin alphanumeric characters are from Recursive Mono Semibold and everything else at least started with Noto Sans. Both are released under the SIL Open Font License. As for this tileset, I'm releasing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. Here's the SVG file, if you want to do your own thing with it. It has Inkscape-specific annotations, so you'll get the best support if you use that program.

Enjoy!!  ;D

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