As more people noticing that Dwarf Fortress doesn't look quite the same as before after downloading the latest starter packs, I decided to start a thread in this subforum to raise awareness of this plugin and address some questions/issues.
The main thread is here, but I'd like to keep it more for developers/advanced users, and this one for general audience.
So, what is TWBT (short for Text Will Be Text)? In short, it's a plugin that changes this
into this
Specifically, on these screenshots you can see the following features:
1. Separate tilesets for the map area and text, no more coffins and other symbols instead of some letters and punctuation. Also, text and map fonts can have different sizes - smaller rectangular for text, and square for the map. Plus there's no more minimum number of rows/columns on screen, so you can use tiles of any size on any screen resolution.
2. Rendering of multiple levels terrain. Useful in many locations and especially in mountains:
3. It's possible to load additional tilesets and override images used for certain items, buildings and terrain/construction tiles. On the screenshots you can see custom icons for various clothes, weapons and ammo by Meph and custom icon for up/down stairs by LeoCean. It's possible to change graphics for virtually any in-game object. You can have custom workshops with complete custom graphics.
4. Some other console goodies (well you can't see this on screenshots),
full information is in readme.
Latest version is available hereNow,
important notes:
1. There are two branches available - 3.xx, which doesn't support different sizes for map and text tiles and is slower, and 4.xx that has all the features mentioned above, is faster, but some users reported crashes with it, I'm working on this now. Once 4.xx is stable, the old one will be discontinued.
2. You don't have to enable all the features if you don't like them. You can continue to use the same tileset for map and text; you can disable multilevel rendering or set it to any number of additional levels, configure fog and shadows, eg. if you prefer more distinction between levels; you can use or not use overrides.
3. Version 4.xx is not currently compatible with stonesense overlay and rendermax plugin, and will not be at least for some time.
4. I'm primarily aiming at Fortress Mode. Adventure Mode works too, even multilevel rendering with 4.xx branch, but I don't play it so there're likely broken things.
5. It requires OpenGL rendering mode (PRINT_MODE set to STANDARD) in init.txt. This mode is
not compatible with TTF text. If you want to continue to use TTF text, delete/don't install this plugin and be happy, but you won't get any other features of this plugin as well.
6. Currently there are not so much additional graphics available for overrides, so I'd like to attract attention of artists who can make new tilesets, not being limited by 256 tiles most of which are used for several things.
7. Be ready that multilevel rendering of course has some impact on FPS. I tried to optimize it as much as possible but anyway keep number of additional levels reasonable (the maximum is 15 and you probably don't want to use it). This is controlled with "multilevel 0-15" command.
8. In version 4.xx all screens except for the main fortress mode and adventure mode screens use text font. This means text font is used on worldgen and on pre-embark screen. One of the reasons is that map graphics doesn't work well for world maps. I have some solutions for this planned, but for now, don't be surprised.
9. I'll continue to add important things to this list based on people feedback and complains I notice here and in other threads.
