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[Starver]

Spoiler: First, Rollers Redux (click to show/hide)

I looked a little ahead for the prior post, but didn't see this far ahead...

Edit: haha! Fluid roller animation with a single chain. I'm finally happy with the result.

...apart from still not convinced by direct chain-drive (prefer rollers to fulfil lore/canon, and a set of conical frustra with their tips converging to the inner focus of a curve would work for corner roller-drivers) I am very impressed with that art. I'd accept that in place of my own head-canon. Until/unless you have to scrap them and redraw them anyway, in which case I demand you make the new ones exactly like I imagine them.

New new subject comment on the next thing talked about recently: I often set up ore/metal/alloy/flux/carbon stockpiles, especially, in checkerboard+ configurations, near the magma workshops they feed/feed-upon.

In each (typically) 11x11 room (my standard largest footprint, between my corridor gridding and intersticial walls) I'd assign a full stockpile for item-type-1, then deselct every other {or every n^th) spot and over-stockpile for item-type-2, to reuse the gaps. Repeat as necesary. (The whole point being a snazzy way to have a visual track of the comparative filling of each type, next to each other. The size is unimportant, that's just the tyoical largest thing with 61 slots for A and 60 slots for B or 41+40+40 for A+B+C, etc being quite handy.) It leaves heavily non-contiguous areas (maybe just corners touching) of each type.

So... Liking a lot of the rope/border mockups of the stockpiles, I can only imagine how they'd look in this situation. Very busy.

Less busy, but might need thought, are my square stockpiles around a stairwell or even a workshop (sometimes seen elsewhere in my designs) typically 5x5 with a 1x1 or 3x3 centre removed for (as mentioned by someone else) non-blinking on the stairway tile, which probably won't happen in a Steam GUI or in order to go around the workshop site.

Not quite as extreme an enclave/exclave situation as my first, but still suggests the need for an inner (convexly defining) rope or border to look like it's such a *clave-boundary to reflect the outer one.


Not that my peculiar play-style has any bearing on the end solution. Just interested.

(My thoughts, which I can't illustrate with a mock-up just this moment, were a kind of edge-boundry static 'glow', hard edged outwards, fading to transparency in a handful of pixels inwards, like a smudged-inwards version of the 'bar boundry' suggestion, almost. Adjoining tockpile boundaries, especially of different hues, would delineate quite well and it could be ethereal enough not to look too artificial nor physical and still not changing the original floor. And could be followed across diverse underlying floor-types, as often happens to exist in dug-out stores that used to be busy with mineral veins beforehand.  Similar, if perhaps with differing edge-scalloping, zoning (pastures)/etc could be given this treatment, though zones yet can and do overlap in whole or part so maybe that needs yet another idea. Again, I can see this is by far not the only answer.)

[Bumber]

The lower levels of the multilevel view look kind of like they're underwater. Probably needs to be desaturated more, like a Beau blue.

[PatrikLundell]

Feedback on Toady's devlog regarding multi level. The haze effect is a bit too blue, in my opinion, giving the immediate impression of looking through water from 3 levels up. However, I'm sure that impression will wear off quickly enough if you keep it, and the rest of the stuff displayed looked great.

Bumber typed faster than I did...

[Pillbo]

What would you guys think about unique corpse and remains sprites? Now that vermin all get a unique sprite, it's a bit odd to have a single sprite for all remains.

Yes please

[CL3AR]

There needs to be a linear gradient on the ramps, but Mayday says that it has a higher performance impact.

[Uthimienure]

What would you guys think about unique corpse and remains sprites? Now that vermin all get a unique sprite, it's a bit odd to have a single sprite for all remains.

Absolutely!

[CL3AR]

I wonder how it would look if instead of placing creatures at the center of a tile, you guys shift the creatures upward so that their feet stand more near the center of the tile. Basically add some transparent pixels to the bottom of the spite to shift it upward a few pixels.

Might make it look less like the creatures are just pasted over the tiles if their feet stood closer to the middle.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Agreed on the slightly too blueish lower view making it look a bit much like water.

Also, on the ramps, the half-rampy bits feel really jarring, but maybe that's just me. The darker shadows in the bottom of them do a good job of making them seem deeper but the edges kinda ruins the illusion now, maybe adding a thin line down to ground level would help? (not all rounded like before but just some faint edge kind of to hint that the bottom is at ground level).

Edit: Kinda like this, so one could imagine there's a slight crack running down the bottom of it where fluids etc could flow.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Schmaven]

The semi transparent sprites for planned furniture is a great idea.  Definitely makes what's going on in the fort a lot more obvious without needing to pause and look at each piece.

[Starver]

I kind of like the idea of blue grey with sparkles tbh.

I think, when I very first started out (vanilla codepage graphics) I imagined the filler-chars were something real. Older and wiser these days (still stuck on vanilla, personally, though enjoying these graphics mightly, nontheless) but I'd warn about making any "sparkles" or swirls too much like something to immediately dig for, for the expected novice user.

Or maybe you should. It's a low-risk issue to tempt someone to mine the latest equivalent of a dither-placed % in undue excitemen, a handful of times.


Animation-wise, they should be on cycles (or, if not strictly cycled in regularity but scintilating each time individually at some point onwards since the last sparkling) maybe on the order of minutes. Some tens of seconds at minimum, across the whole window of visibility. The animated wall-gems could maybe be anything up to 0.1Hz (per local cluster, not tile?) to attract the eye to be more obvious and encourage either mining or admiration without too much pestering or becoming annoyingly distracting.

In my mind, anyway. YMMV on those details, and as I envisage its implementation, it'd be code (or global/MAT configuration) that drives that so is ultimately Toady's call.

[Starver]

Edit: Kinda like this, so one could imagine there's a slight crack running down the bottom of it where fluids etc could flow.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the one place in that image (edit: two places! Didn't realise how wide the image was...) where it counts (place where a bunch of water might initially sit and yet flow out through a ramped pinch-point) that's pretty much as I imagined avoiding double-steep ramping but not setting up an area that looks less drainable than it is. And looks like it would 'work' physically (if not actually be inevitable, the first time it rained...). And in the places without a distinct feed-pool it still looks ok and like the result of an eroding rivulet from Z+1

I thought I should say, as you obviously had that in mind some time before my own comment about it got published.

[ror6ax]

Is there a separate thread for menu UX redesign or can one start rambling in here  ?

[Manveru Taurënér]

Is there a separate thread for menu UX redesign or can one start rambling in here  ?

That'd be something for the suggestions forum. Afaik Threetoe was compiling info from various UI suggestion threads there for whatever the changes would be.

[CL3AR]

The wall spite isn't displaying the sides when there's a door. It looks like the wall just cuts off.

[bloop_bleep]

The wall spite isn't displaying the sides when there's a door. It looks like the wall just cuts off.

I would prefer that, actually.