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[Rooster]

Should I remind you all of the first armok?It was 3D.It sucked.

[Haven]

quote:Originally posted by Rooster:
<STRONG>Should I remind you all of the first armok?It was 3D.It sucked.</STRONG>

Tharfor, all 3D things suck. And things with Armok in their names. Yeah.

Seriously though, that's a bit of a broad assumption, not only in the 'blame the 3D', as we have 3D-alike functions already, but also assuming Armok sucked, as there's a forum dedicated to it.

[Frobozz]

quote:Originally posted by Mikademus:
<STRONG>DF *isn't* a text-mode game - it is a game in full OpenGL where the graphical tiles are pictures of glyphs.</STRONG>

OpenGL or not the fact still remains that it is currently a tile-based 2D game.

quote:Originally posted by Mikademus:
<STRONG>However, if a 3D presenation mode will be included it might be better to use a more estabished 3D engine -like OGRE or Irrlich- rather than Cube, even if the screens look cool enough.</STRONG>

Don't forget Crystal Space.

I don't suppose one of Toady's frameworks is already out there for one of his game? I'd like to see someone try to convert one of his games to 3D by just working with the framework. At least it'd be nice to see if its possible.

[mickel]

quote:Originally posted by Dasleah:
<STRONG>Dwarf Fortress doesn't need 'graphics'. One of the reasons that DF is so incredibly awesome is that it's a game that focuses on gameplay. It's all about playing the game, and adding things the complement, accentuate, and enhance that gameplay. And you can argue all you want, but graphics are not gameplay.</STRONG>

I disagree, the graphics really need an overhaul, but not much. We already have separate tiles for the creatures. What we need are separate tiles for everything. It's a nuisance to not be able to tell what you're looking at visually. Is that a tree or a fish, or maybe a door? We don't know.

And no, graphics are not gameplay, but it's a big part of gameplay.

To get back to the topic, the Cube engine really is awesome, but I don't know if it would handle the non-euclidian dimensions of Dwarf Fortress. As in how do you visualise a passage that is at the same time too small for two kittens to both stand in it, while at the same time it's large enough to stack a thousand anvils and still allow a mule to walk through it completely unhindered?

[Dasleah]

Again I'd like to point out that Dwarf Fortress ALREADY fulfils the definition being 3D - it has an X, Y, and Z axis. Hell, it really fulfils the definition of being a High Definition game. So I'm going to guess when people say '3D' they assume they want 3D models and for DF to look like Age of Mythology or Warcraft 3 or something.

Yeah, if Toady's smart, then the content is as divorced as possible from the rendering engine / event framework. But the fact is, we don't know, so we might as well assume a worst-case scenario and be pleasantly surprised.

And about that content... people are divided between it remaining 'flat' and using ASCII textures, and making it 3D like in today's RTS'. For the person that mentioned it, yes, DF would be the perfect candidate for procedural content generation, mainly because it's the only reasonable way to create that much content and still reasonably expect an update within a year. But if you're going to do it the old fashioned way... let's be realistic. Even if Toady throws DF to the wind and asks for users to create content for him (which has been pretty much proved will never be the case) - how many projects have you seen die because of the lack of shiny 3D content? Even if they get professional artists, it's still often months between releases of models, and until they're released, the project stalls (and often dies)

That's why I love that DF is ASCII. Because we don't have to wait for the art department because it's all abstracted away. E is for Elephant, and everyone knows what an E looks like. An E is an E and it's already on everyone's computer. It doesn't take anything special to use it, it doesn't require modification or texturing or animating or optimising or anything. Fonts by definition are easy to look at, easy to change colour, easily scaled up, and easily to replicate. And you don't have to be an artist to use it. Which means that we don't have to stall the addition of actual gameplay and stall releases because we're waiting on some Joe to finish the texture and Idling animation for Skeletal Groundhogs. You want Skeletal Groundhogs? G. There you go. What would of taken an art department weeks, I've just done in a second.

Once again, graphics are not gameplay.

But I really don't get a lot of people's arguements. DF is already 3D.

"Wouldn't it be cool if everything moved in 3D and we had smoke that trailed up into the sky and could push things off cliffs and they fell and went splat and we had terrain with slopes and dips and towering mountains and water that flowed around and lava too and wouldn't it be awesome if birds flew around in the sky?!?!?!"

You mean like it already does?

*sigh*

And CUBE is not voxelised. If you're going to make a pointless assertion, at least research your buzzwords.

[Surma]

quote:Originally posted by Frobozz:
<STRONG>
...

I don't suppose one of Toady's frameworks is already out there for one of his game? I'd like to see someone try to convert one of his games to 3D by just working with the framework. At least it'd be nice to see if its possible.</STRONG>

Kobold Quest for Windows
(*)Kobold Quest 1.02 (1.8MB, Posted September 10, 2006)
(*)Kobold Quest 1.02 Source (1.8MB, VC6, BSD License)

# Kobold Quest for Mac OS X (port by Matthew Moss with additions by eli)
(*)Kobold Quest 1.06 (1.8MB, Posted February 24, 2008)
(*)Kobold Quest 1.06 Source (1.8MB, XCode, BSD License)

Found from here: http://bay12games.com/games/

Basically a while back Toady One posted a quest for all Mac programmers to basically port Kobold Quest (which he stated was the basis for DF) to Mac.

Taking that, he then turned out the Mac version of DF.

(yes, I know, that's not the entire history of what happened, but it's near enough for this thread)

So basically, get Kobold Quest working in 3D, and have fun while doing it!    :p

edit: the following:

 

quote:Originally posted by Dasleah:
...

That's why I love that DF is ASCII. Because we don't have to wait for the art department because it's all abstracted away. E is for Elephant, and everyone knows what an E looks like. An E is an E and it's already on everyone's computer. It doesn't take anything special to use it, it doesn't require modification or texturing or animating or optimising or anything. Fonts by definition are easy to look at, easy to change colour, easily scaled up, and easily to replicate. And you don't have to be an artist to use it. Which means that we don't have to stall the addition of actual gameplay and stall releases because we're waiting on some Joe to finish the texture and Idling animation for Skeletal Groundhogs. You want Skeletal Groundhogs? G. There you go. What would of taken an art department weeks, I've just done in a second.

...

Actually, it uses a sprite sheet. *cough* Which OpenGL then renders to the screen as a sprite. You can find the sprite sheet it uses in data\art\curses_640x300.bmp or data\art\curses_800x600.bmp . Assuming you're not using a custom graphics sprite sheet.

>.>

As to all the rest, yep. The game is 3D. It just doesn't render everything in 3D.

[ May 22, 2008: Message edited by: Surma ]

[Dasleah]

quote:Originally posted by Surma:
<STRONG>Actually, it uses a sprite sheet. *cough* Which OpenGL then renders to the screen as a sprite. You can find the sprite sheet it uses in data\art\curses_640x300.bmp or data\art\curses_800x600.bmp . Assuming you're not using a custom graphics sprite sheet.

>.>
</STRONG>

Well, yeah, I knew that, but it's still using fonts, just in a roundabout kinda way   :p

[Fedor]

quote:Originally posted by Dasleah:
<STRONG>Again I'd like to point out that Dwarf Fortress ALREADY fulfils the definition being 3D - it has an X, Y, and Z axis. Hell, it really fulfils the definition of being a High Definition game. So I'm going to guess when people say '3D' they assume they want 3D models and for DF to look like Age of Mythology or Warcraft 3 or something.</STRONG>

Invalid assumption.  Please read Sean Mirrsen's posts in particular.

One of the biggest stumbling-blocks to intelligent discussion of presentation is to make assumptions of this sort, shoe-horning proposals put forth by others into fixed visual categories, however absurd.  In order to contribute, we need to "see", using an open-minded imagination, what is actually being proposed.

--------

DF could indeed benefit from the addition of perspective and the ability to view more than one z-level at a time, regardless of whether it uses ASCII or something else.  Seeing bolts streaking down from towers and boulders arcing up, then down onto goblin hordes, or a fountain, or a falling muskox, from an eagle's eye view taking in the whole of the action would be inexpressibly cool.

[Surma]

Oh, I just had a image pop into my head from Fedor's post..

Imagine being able to see everything going on (top down or not) from +19 in the air. e.g. there's no limiting 'fog of open space' just really small dwarves pitching anvils at invading bronze colossi. Of course that example was indoors, so you wouldn't really see it.. but still!

Sort of like zooming out in some of the recent RTS games (I was thinking Supreme Commander at the time of thinking this.) Not the Icon Map part, just the zooming out really far so you could see all the destruction your really tiny units were doing.

Anyway.. *wanders off*

[Mikademus]

quote:Originally posted by Fedor:
<STRONG>DF could indeed benefit from the addition of perspective and the ability to view more than one z-level at a time, regardless of whether it uses ASCII or something else.  Seeing bolts streaking down from towers and boulders arcing up, then down onto goblin hordes, or a fountain, or a falling muskox, from an eagle's eye view taking in the whole of the action would be inexpressibly cool.</STRONG>

This I sign, in principle.

However, the implementation aspect and the strange consequence, of this would be that everything downwards is rendered, while everything above is cut away to reveal the burrowing at the present Y-level (X and Z are the plane and Y is elevation in my prefered coordinate system). This will have gameplay and interface consequences, as when besiging an enemy and not seing anything above your level. Of course, this is solvable, but it goes to show that there would be a great deal of messiness involved with adding a "3D" presentation to DF.

[Sindai]

DF already has an extremely simplistic 3D display: the "this isn't designed to be useful at this time" 3D terrain view in fortress mode.

Taking something like that and simply overlaying the tiles on the horizontal surfaces would actually be a decent first pass at 3D. At the very least it gives you a better view of the cliff/hill layout of the area. (I find it annoyingly difficult to visualize the lay of the land with the 2D view we have now.)

You'd have to keep the current Z-axis "slicing" so you could see inside of things and underground of course.

And it would probably be just an "view" mode to start with, since the math for determining things like mouse click location for designation (or whatever other mouse controls get added in the Presentation Arc) would get trickier.

On the other hand, even for something as simple as that the performance penalty might be too great, since DF already use up all the CPU available and I'm given to understand that the 3D visualizer program that already exists (and operates similarly to this in that it simply converts the existing tile geometry into 3D) is sort of slow.

Lastly,
   

quote:Originally posted by Sean Mirrsen:
<STRONG>Did any of you play Total Annihilation? It was an RTS from 1997. It was the first RTS to feature full-3D models for units. That didn't alter the fact that it was still largely 2D - the models were rendered onto sprites in realtime,</STRONG>

This is wrong. The unit and building models were completely 3D. It was non-hardware-accelerated, mostly untextured 3D, but it was still 3D.

[ May 22, 2008: Message edited by: Sindai ]

[mickel]

quote:Originally posted by Surma:
<STRONG>really small dwarves pitching anvils at invading bronze colossi</STRONG>

People liked it! I'm actually really silly proud that I have made some sort of contribution.  

[mickel]

quote:Originally posted by Dasleah:
<STRONG>

Well, yeah, I knew that, but it's still using fonts, just in a roundabout kinda way    :p</STRONG>

No it doesn't. It uses graphical tiles. The tiles used fonts, but that's moot since it's not fonts that are on your computer and that everyone uses. It's fonts that are drawn on a bitmap image and that are distributed with the game (and separately). The fact the "E" glyph also happens to double as a symbol for "Elephant" and "Elf" and Armok knows what isn't really a selling point. It's more of an annoyance.

[ctrlfrk]

I am an ascii supporter. I already dislike the custom tilesets and graphics options that are available in DF.

I must however point out that the dwarf fortress 3d visualiser is one of the best tools that this community has offered, and it isn't even realtime.

My standing argument is that adding graphical tiles doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't do with ascii, this argument fails when looking at a fully 3d engine.

The ability to see multiple levels of your fortress would open the doors for multilevel dig assignments, more intuitive army management, it would make it easier to detect possible caveins and would cut down on the amount of time the player spends pressing '>' and '<'.

I couldn't care less what the 3d looked like, it could be simple cubes with textures pulled from the ascii tilesets, the point is that it will show multiple levels, where the current system only shows 1.

To all the people bringing up armok I as an example, I hope you're not implying toady hasn't learned anything from that, and saying he will make the same mistakes again, because I highly doubt it.

And the TA example was an interesting one, it is essentially 2d as you say, much like dwarf fortress is now, but the people working on the "Spring" engine have successfully transformed it into a fully 3d engine, using nothing but the original models. Infact it is one of the best examples of a 2d game being transferred to 3d with minimal (comparatively at least) effort.

I don't want toady to drop all the additions he is making now to move to 3d, and it would surprise me if he did. But once he has reached the end of his list of features, maybe this engine would be an interesting, simplish way of giving the UI a much needed boost.

[gurra_geban]

Zaratustra, dont bother with the douchbaggery of this forum. By some reason ppl here like to keep all the threads they DISLIKE at page 1, in some sort of downward whining spiral.

How unoriginal and irrelevant to Toadys plans your suggestion is, i would also like to see df in 3d. Seriously, who wouldn't!?

For now, i am really content with browsing the dev notes for goodies about the new army arc. If Toady would indeed start with a 3d version of df i would be more disappointed than pleased, as there are way much more interesting features and fixes to be made