Bay 12 Games Forum

Looks good to me.

Don't feel married to what I had there already though - it can handle transparency etc. just fine, I was just providing a simple template, so do whatever you think conveys the information best. 

The current discussion reminds me that I made this thing a while back for something totally unrelated.  I imagine it could be helpful if someone wanted to do a fast mockup of something. 



A real 3D implementation would be much better though, since different angle-projections could be made much more easily (this thing just draws a bunch of quadrilaterals on the screen). 

That did the trick! my sprites can now have clothes!

They don't seem to get colored by dyes tho, is that a possibility in the future?

Yes, Japa has dyes working (observe midnight blue dimple dye in my screenshot) and that should be in the next version. 

We should also bear in mind here that in DF "LEGENDARY" means just that - if you're a LEGENDARY dodger, you're pretty much Neo, and LEGENDARY masons can carve a masterwork stone table from a heap of rubble in less than a day using nothing but their bare hands. 

If middling throwers are routinely lobbing off peaople's limbs when tossing arrows about, then yeah, that'd be a bug, but you really can't look at the upper echelons of the skills to determine if something is functioning properly or not, because they are all representative of pretty much superhuman ability. 

In any case, that's all likely to be overhauled the next time combat gets looked at, which will be... sometime in the future.  A lot will probably change along with the combat/move speed split, and really, if you're looking for a problem with the current combat system, than that's it right there.  Until then, camels will be deadly ninjas, which is in my mind a much larger issue than imbalance in the throwing skill. 

Well, here we are, I finally have enough dwarven clothing to show it off:

I'm still missing turbans and veils, but I think I'll hold off on those (dwarves can't make them so they aren't top priority).  It also looks strange if a dwarf wears a hood and a helmet at the same time, but I don't really know how to fix that.  Otherwise, layering is working very well, and the sprites are scaling extremely well.  The metal armor pieces are all completely flat at the moment because I want to do the "shiny metal" effects all at once when I've got the stance-sprites and female-sprites and female-stance-sprites all working. 

Those shouldn't individually take as long as these have because I have a starting point to work from now. 

Well, I managed to get job icons working (?), and all by myself, too! 

The bottom icon is the current mood/status indicator, and the top one is the job indicator I added (placeholder art).  They all play nice at different scales and move down appropriately when the others are not present. 

This is the first time I've managed to try something out before Japa adds it in (proud of myself). 

Anyway, I am stuck trying to figure out dwarven helmets and veils at the moment, but once that's done I'll post a tentative version of the large clothed dwarf sprites somewhere. 

It is hard to make good helmets 

@multithreading

At the risk of contributing to another pages-long angry debate about mutithreading, I would just like to add my two cents on the issue:  (note: the following is just an opinion)

Specifically, unless you are running a small set of completely independent things, multithreading is a lot of work to get right, and in general forcing multithreading into problems that don't lend themselves easily to task division is dangerous, and overall just bad programming practice, because you can actually end up slowing your program down if the tasks aren't large/separable enough. 

In general, wherever possible, a good programmer should try to improve their algorithms, as opposed to relying on hardware growth as a crutch.  If you don't believe me, take a look at the pathing costs in the algorithms compared here.  Typically, for similar amounts of effort, you'll make much greater gains by trying to compute things in a clever way than trying to multithread them.  Only when you're certain that you've made all possible algorithmic improvements, and things are still too slow should you start appealing to multithreading as a last resort. 

@BACK ON TOPIC:

I am super excited about the opportunity to clothe my dwarves.  I typically turn migration off early and run very long forts which have lots of children, all of whom invariably end up running around in the buff claiming every discarded sock on the ground but never doing anything with them, well into their adult years. 

Not to mention any ulterior motives I might have for wanting to see dwarven clothing bugs fixed...

Um... I'm rather ignorant about it, but why do you need such a high zoom? I mean I prefer having an overview then see only 50 or so tiles.

I get where you're coming from, and I like stonesesnse's pixel-y look as well (I've made a few 32x32 sprite sheets myself if you check my sig).  There are no plans to remove that, and I'm going to be trying to set things up so that switching between the current 32x32 tiles and the 256x256 tiles I'm working on is simple (probably just change the name of one file) so that people can use the one they like best with little to no hassle. 

As for "why", well, we have all the information, and we have the ability to display it, so why not show off your squad of bronze-clad dwarves wielding silver warhammers?  As Japa said, it's for viewing what individual dwarves are wearing, because stonesense can do that now. You posted a while back that parts of stonesense are looking pretty cluttered right now, and that's an accurate observation.  If that detail is provided at a different scale, however, it should end up being less cluttered, since there won't be so many things of that detail level on the screen at once, and zooming out should smooth things to the point where the detail isn't visible, giving a much cleaner look at things.  The point is to show more detail, but make things less cluttered at the same time.   The zoom function (',' and '.') was added to try to give the best of both worlds - zoom in to see detail, zoom out to get an overview.