Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Author Topic: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning  (Read 4730 times)

PTTG??

  • Bay Watcher
  • Kringrus! Babak crulurg tingra!
    • View Profile
    • http://www.nowherepublishing.com
Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« on: April 08, 2010, 12:43:12 am »

I have an idea for a community project. Basically, we start with a randomly-generated region map, basically a screen cap from DF. A simple set of paths is drawn on this; something like a grid of hallways and corridors. This is then broken up into 16x16 map squares that individuals can claim, fill with detail using something similar to DFpaint, and return.

The finished project would be an amazing kaleidoscope of scenes, from battles to workshops to lone dwarves to kobolds entangled in traps... whatever the artist was thinking of when they made that square.

Unfortunately, DFpaint appears to have died.

I have a few other ideas:

- Prod somebody into finishing DFpaint to the point where it could be put together.
- Ask for screen shots from DF, which would be bad because nobody has the same font, and all the squares need to be the same size.
- Ask for hand-painted art from Paint or some other bitmap thing, which would be ugly and irregular.

Also, I would need a way to efficiently link images.

Ideally, each image would be a 16x16 tile square that could be assembled either by just having the images adjacent in html, or by being composed once and then uploaded to DFmaps.

Presenting the scenes not as images but as raw text would be much lower bandwidth and would mean far less per-section editing.

Any ideas?

Oh, worst-case scenario: Just have one huge map and have it get checked out, edited, and returned. Again, it could be compressed by using raw text.
« Last Edit: April 09, 2010, 09:45:57 am by PTTG?? »
Logged
A thousand million pool balls made from precious metals, covered in beef stock.

Shintaro Fago

  • Bay Watcher
  • discuss safe nourishing non-plant non-animal diets
    • View Profile
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #1 on: April 08, 2010, 08:54:22 am »

Or you can try ASCIIdraw. Won't have one or two tiles but otherwise it's good.
Logged

PTTG??

  • Bay Watcher
  • Kringrus! Babak crulurg tingra!
    • View Profile
    • http://www.nowherepublishing.com
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #2 on: April 08, 2010, 09:54:40 am »

Ohhh... That looks good. Participants could just post their section of the map...

And it's at http://www.tailpig.com/AsciiDraw/, which makes me think of pig tail cloth.
Logged
A thousand million pool balls made from precious metals, covered in beef stock.

Doomshifter

  • Bay Watcher
  • Deal with it.
    • View Profile
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #3 on: April 08, 2010, 10:02:34 am »

I'm assuming you want pretty much the image of an entire, blank map, from top to bottom, like you get with the DFMA?

Or do you want something else? If you can tell me, I'll give you a screenshot, or whatever it is you want.
Logged
Add me on PesterChum! My chumhandle is doomedHermit.
Right now Rampages seem to be Godzilla quietly walking into Tokyo, biting the leg off of one reporter... then creeping off again without a sound.

PTTG??

  • Bay Watcher
  • Kringrus! Babak crulurg tingra!
    • View Profile
    • http://www.nowherepublishing.com
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #4 on: April 08, 2010, 08:28:38 pm »

I thought about it and I think we'll actually start with a totally blank area and let it grow, so we'll start blank.
Logged
A thousand million pool balls made from precious metals, covered in beef stock.

Neyvn

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #5 on: April 09, 2010, 02:11:49 am »

//Looks at Thread Description... Ponders for a minute... Looks back with a confused look...//

HUH???
Logged
Quote from: Ubiq
Broker: Wasn't there an ambush squad here just a second ago?
Merchant: I don't know what you're talking about. Do you want this goblin ankle bone amulet or not?
My LIVESTREAM. I'm Aussie, so not everything is clean. Least it works...

qwertyuiopas

  • Bay Watcher
  • Photoshop is for elves who cannot use MSPaint.
    • View Profile
    • uristqwerty.ca, my current (barren) site.
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #6 on: April 16, 2010, 10:32:56 pm »

Today I checked my emails for the first time in over a week.
It had something pointing here from the 8th mentioning needing something like DFpaint.

It was evidently sent just before the ASCIIdraw post.

However, I could improve what I have a bit, since it does have a few advantages, most notably would be that it is a graphical program and loads it's font from a file, by default designed to work with an old copy of DF's (back when DF's 8x12 font was a .bmp)

If ASCIIdraw is insufficient for any particular reason, I could use some recent discoveries to upgrade what I have a bit. As it is, can you believe I created it to illustrate an airship for a game, then later converted it to do art for tacticus, and recently reclaimed it for an adventure? Ironically, it has a colour-picking and character-picking mode very similar to ASCIIdraw, only you open it by holding a key rather than switching to it with F2 or F3.
One possible upgrade would be exporting images rather than requiring print screen, and a bit of directory tweaking to correctly save the swap file where it should be...
Oh, and using recent insights from my roguelike to make changes instantaneous on large images. And with that added, allow manipulation of images larger than the screen... And maybe a selection cursor, to show what character/colour/tile is selected...

And at the very least, I could try to simply contribute, and get this started.
Logged
Eh?
Eh!

PTTG??

  • Bay Watcher
  • Kringrus! Babak crulurg tingra!
    • View Profile
    • http://www.nowherepublishing.com
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #7 on: April 16, 2010, 11:47:02 pm »

Well, if you can make your program work well with 64bit windows and maybe even non-windows OSes, you'd be several steps ahead of ASCIIdraw; I can't get it to work on my main computer.

Images would be great; text is low-bandwidth, but images are more universal, and since we can put them up on DFmaps pretty efficiently, I think we've got a good system, once we figure out how to stitch them.
Logged
A thousand million pool balls made from precious metals, covered in beef stock.

qwertyuiopas

  • Bay Watcher
  • Photoshop is for elves who cannot use MSPaint.
    • View Profile
    • uristqwerty.ca, my current (barren) site.
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #8 on: April 17, 2010, 05:14:06 pm »

Well, it currently uses Win32 and OpenGL.

So, if someone wanted to make a SDL version, it should run just about anywhere, and as it is, is probably runs well under wine and likely works with at most a recompile on 64 bit windows.

It also has a save format that is only 8 + (9*tiles) bytes, although if I cut out the unused alpha byte, it could drop to 8 + (7*tiles), and if I didn't use the full RGBA, and only limited it to the 256 colours easily accessable(as in, available from within the program, while all other 4294967296 possibilities for each of the foreground and background only available through hex editing... Hey, why not add custom RGB selection as a feature, too?), then it would only take 8 + (2*tiles) bytes per save.

Each tile is an 8x12 character, but since the save format is resolution-independant, the font can be changed at any time, even to a graphical tileset, and it could be added that the tile size is inferred from the tileset image.

If you want to try it, I've uploaded it here.
It has no help file, no help command, and no intuitive interface(except maybe left click to draw, escape to instantly quit).
Spoiler: controls (click to show/hide)

As you can see, it needs much work, in every aspect, especially the controls.

The colour scheme is actually not identical to DF's, as it allows colours DF treats as foreground only to be used as background colours.

To alter the dimensions of the swap space, you must make a copy of the swap space file, alter it as a regular one, and then save it. Once all instances of the program are closed, you must then copy it back over the swap space file.

Oh, and finally, two images are included. ONe is a font that I have been making myself, and the other is an old copy of DF's. DF's is appended with _old, since I never bothered to alter the font naming scheme.

Source code is available, but reccomended against, as I have a bit of a habit of utilizing coments soley for excluding code from compiling :)
Logged
Eh?
Eh!

Retro

  • Bay Watcher
  • o7
    • View Profile
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #9 on: April 18, 2010, 10:09:57 am »

Does anyone else see the irony in the title "Chaos Fortress - Planning"?

qwertyuiopas

  • Bay Watcher
  • Photoshop is for elves who cannot use MSPaint.
    • View Profile
    • uristqwerty.ca, my current (barren) site.
Re: Rerithgeshud: Chaos Fortress - Planning
« Reply #10 on: April 18, 2010, 04:30:07 pm »

Didn't before, but now that I notced, yes, it is quite ironic.
Logged
Eh?
Eh!