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[NW_Kohaku]

Transparency is also helpful if you are dealing with things like smoke and miasma - they currently completely obscure anything within them to the player, making players have to "pixel hunt", so to speak, with the look function to try to find things inside of them, since they don't transition between the smoke and any other tile, so it would be a functionality boost in that regard, as well.

[Mike Mayday]

Yeah, the blinking of animated and especially underwater ramps (oh my god how I hate those!) is less than optimal.
Ramp icon with a water icon overlay and appropriate colors would be fine.

[gchristopher]

Wow, that's a lot of good advice. I'll try messing with the framerate options! (Once I can talk them into looking at the screen again. Last time, after less than 20 minutes of trying to embark, they spent the next day-and-a-half recovering from the headache. It was scary.) Thanks!

In your ideal world, what would DF look like?

There's a limit to how much I can change. I could blend temporally adjacent frames, but I'm not convinced motion-blur is the desired effect here.

The way it was described to me, it sounds like blurring frames might do it. The sudden jarring transitions will still happen even with a lowered framerate, but if the blurring is across enough frames to produce a smoothed transition effect, that could be enough. Even if you're rendering at 30+ FPS and simulating at 60 FPS, the actual number of on-screen visual game events is usually not more then 3-4/second. You'd have to tune it for the rate at which the interface blinks, so maybe blur the past 5-10 frames? It's hard to say without seeing it.

In addition to the transparency options above, I'd suggest a micro-sized, non-blinking overlay on a tile to indicate that there's more than one character to be displayed. Typically it's either an overlay (like Depot view) which might even be more usable if you just put a red or green icon in the corner of a tile, or a fairly clear-cut case of a primary icon with an icon of secondary importance being alternated. (A dwarf carrying an object or an object on a ramp.) A perfect-world implementation of a 'picture-in-picture' approach would expand the various contents of a tile when you mouse over it.

[gchristopher]

There's a limit to how much I can change. I could blend temporally adjacent frames, but I'm not convinced motion-blur is the desired effect here.

What were you planning to use as your approach for this? Modified SDL libraries?

[Keldane]

Would simply switching to full screen and zooming out help? It wouldn't slow or reduce the blinking, but it would decrease the amount of the screen that was flashing at once.

[gchristopher]

Would simply switching to full screen and zooming out help? It wouldn't slow or reduce the blinking, but it would decrease the amount of the screen that was flashing at once.

Good question. That might just spread out the blinking underwater ramps, and they still couldn't hit 'D' or edit burrows safely.

[Alidus]

I was just thinking about this the other day and I'm glad somebody actually posted about it.

Luckily I don't have physical seizures or anything, but I kind of have to check zones and depot access by looking away from the monitor and trying to size it up out of the side of my vision because looking directly at it causes me to immediately be stunned, get an instant headache, and feel like I need to throw up.

[BigD145]

dfhack's 'deramp' will get rid of underwater ramps.