Bay 12 Games Forum

These pillars and smooth walls are surprisingly gorgeous!

Please speak up if you have anything to say. That's the only reason I even post the mockups.

I'm always happy to see your work in progress. Really inspiring and shows how much effort you put into the tileset.
I think the grass is definitely an improvement in terms of contrast and noise. Although it seems surprisingly organic (i.e. round) compared to your general style. Not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, just an observation. Tree/grass contrast is good enough considering how it's not that important.

Engraved walls are very subtle, not sure if that's my thing; I really liked the engraving you had in the mockup before (both walls and floor). It looks very unique and a very good fit to how your style evolved. Have you tried that kind of engraved wall design with orthogonal walls?.
The non-engraved floor in that mockup irritated me however. It tiles in a bad way. That is, it looks like it isn't supposed to tile, but it glaringly is. With the current-mockup non-engraved floor it shows that it's tiling, but it looks like it's on purpose and while obvious it doesn't steal focus.
The tile design itself is great, but it's a bit too low contrast with the walls for my tastes.
Looks like it's kinda difficult to distinguish between up, down and up/down stairs.
In general, the single-pixel patterns you started with the arabic-looking font had some very interesting and beautiful results as long as they stayed subtle and out of focus. the "+" floors with single pixel corners for example looked very good. Sometimes, they become too prominent and it becomes difficult to see the actual symbol; I think that's when they can turn from a very interesting style to a "legibility" issue.


tl;dr:
I'd make the non-engraved floor appear bit darker and play around some more with engravings.

Quote from: CLA on December 22, 2018, 09:24:59 am

It's on purpose. The ground is made up of punctuation tiles, and I prefer the ground to be opaque tiles.

I happy about this.  The punctuation tiles on the ground make my eyes bleed...

By the way, I love this tileset.  I've been using it forever.  Thanks for making it!

I'm glad you like it!

I made some more experiments with down ramps and inversion. As it turns out, the ones I have now work best, but I thought I'd share my results for reference. Maybe this helps someone else:

[no idea] how feasable that tree-shadow is though.

I can't imagine it being much different from other "layer projections". In fact, it seems easier to give everything a shadow - i.e. use darker shaded tile everywhere where there's a solid object on z+1 - much like you would show lower elevation levels. The top-down view on the trees looks much better by the way.

Non directional shadow on the ramps looks also much better I think (the ones titled "Meph"). I think it would look better when the gradient between floor and ramps leading upwards is more soft, and there's a more visible barrier between the floor and the ramps leading to the level below. It makes it visually clearer that the "up ramps" belong to the current level and the "down ramps" are just "up-ramps" of the level below.
That way it's communicated to the player that a level consists of a floor and its wall/ramp etc on top. The shadow seen on the middle mockup ("Mayday") feels wrong to me for that reason.

I don't think the ramps work as it is. It's difficult to understand what's going on without consistent shading throughout all tiles, and a different perspective for ramps, sprites, and inside structures doesn't make it easier.

I would suggest trying to let the ramps fade out towards the top, and have ramps on lower elevation fade out towards the bottom.
Fadeout color towards top should be the same color as unexplored rock. Fadeout towards the bottom can be a more foggy blue or whatever.

Hello, I am using the newest version of the starter pack. I was wondering why all of the punctuation appears as colored spaces, is there a solution to this?

It's on purpose. The ground is made up of punctuation tiles, and I prefer the ground to be opaque tiles. As a side effect, the punctuation in text is also these same tiles. While this is a limitation of DF, there are various ways to circumvent this:

• use a tileset that doesn't have opaque ground tiles (I have a separate tileset for that, but there are several other great tilesets that have normal punctuation.)
• use True Type for text (press F12 or change it in your init files). This comes with its own problems (search the bugtracker for TrueType if you want to know the details)
• use DFhack with Mifki's TWBT plugin so you can use a separate tileset just for text. The starter pack probably has some checkbox to enable it. But I never used the starter pack, so it's probably better to search its thread  for a solution. Last time I checked - which was quite a while ago - TWBT was prone to crashes, especially in adventure mode.

Necro this thread.

This tool is still listed on the Utilities thread, but seems long abandoned, and it was very useful.
I found repo's for it on SourceForge, etc., but no code was ever committed.

Does anyone have the source code for RawExplorer?

Does anyone have a complete parser for RAWs that supports all file types?

I didn't explicitly try, but the last version should still parse the raws and show creature graphics correctly. I don't think there was a syntax change. There's also the standardization tools by a user called Quietsun written in matlab. That code also parses the creature raws (and the code is on github). That might help you. What specifically are you planning to do? If you tell us your intentions, we might be able to help better.

That's gorgeous Bearskie. It really shows where DF shines in procedural generation and where it's rough around the edges - or rather, where the edges are not rough enough. It also makes it clear how beautiful the simple graphics of Isoworld look. I take it you will post the end result?

Alright, I merged the Chain and Rope pages. Feel free to work on the template, I don't think I'll find enough time for now.