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[McAndrews]

After reading the entire chronicles of the infamous Boatmurder, I think I have decided to get in on the DF action.  Now, I have never played DF before, but I think I'm going to try one graphics tileset for it.  The ASCII just kills my eyes.  I spend too much time starring at screen shots just trying to see where the dwarfs are, instead of seeing the stuff people are pointing out.  For me learning, the graphics and character tilesets seem like they will just make it much easier.  So do you guys have any favorite tilesets?  I'm thinking of trying the Mike Mayday edition first, or possible the Dystopian Rhetoric graphics set.  So, any advice for people interested in DF like me?  We could put a nice summary of the best tilesets we think are out there, and how to use them. By the way, the ThreePanelSoul one looks nice too.

[FARTRON]

Tilesets make for nice screenshots, but I don't use them because you lose some of the information conveyed in ASCII. A jet door in ascii shows as black, a chalk one as white. In tiles they're all the same. This carries over to stones and ore found in the ground often, and to lose stone in your fortress.

[team_q]

I've never used a tileset, if you can't see it in screen shot, when its moving its a lot easier to pick individual things out.

[Valter]

I've found that just slowly working your way through everything will allow you to figure everything out more easily than otherwise. The ASCII characters are intelligently assigned, so learning everything isn't that difficult. Besides, the more confusing symbols are mostly just used for things like toys and puzzle boxes, which are mostly just stored in bins anyway.

[Lucaz]

I usually prefer ASCII, but sometimes I use this tileset, http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm. It includes everything in the game, including stones and ores, with the same colors, so you don't lose detail. It comes with the whole game, so you don't have to mess with the init files. In the DF wiki you can find a bunch more, but mos just replace untis I guess.

Anyway, ASCII is easy to learn, it took me about an hour to know most things.

[McAndrews]

Thanks guys, on another note, I started a game and I'm thinking of settling in a place called the Hills of Balls.

[McAndrews]

Another question, are there tilesets where you don't lose any information compared to ASCII?

[Alex May]

http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm.

Awesome ads on there:

Dwarves Dwarf
Find what you're looking for.
Feed your passion on eBay.co.uk
www.ebay.co.uk

[Synnah]

Thanks guys, on another note, I started a game and I'm thinking of settling in a place called the Hills of Balls.

I was disappointed that the game doesn't know the Dwarven word for 'beard'. I wanted to call my fortress 'Beard of Bees'.

[tok]

Tilesets make for nice screenshots, but I don't use them because you lose some of the information conveyed in ASCII. A jet door in ascii shows as black, a chalk one as white. In tiles they're all the same. This carries over to stones and ore found in the ground often, and to lose stone in your fortress.

I've messed with making dwarfort graphics, and that's not normal, the stone colour thing. I'm guessing the character set you were using had too much grey, which would dampen your colours a bit.


http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/images/0/00/Df_tock10_1.PNG

On a clean white character set, the recolouring should work fine.

The main issue with dwarf fortress graphics is that most of the stuff in the game is drawn from one image, the character set. Only creatures can get custom tiles.

Problem is, lots of the characters get used for more than one object. Here are some examples: (there's heaps of them, though)
 -the 'uncut gem' tile is also the 'turtle' tile
 -the 'fish' tile is also the 'meat' tile
 -all the refuse tiles are the same, so 'bone' and 'hunk of flesh' are the same tile
 -and, of course, 'goblin fortress' is the same as 'cupboard'
 -even the 'chairs' aren't chairs half the time.
 -there's a list of what tiles are used for what on the wiki at: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Tilesets

On top of this, text characters are used as graphics tiles: the 'pillars' at the end of polished walls are upper-case O's. So even the letterforms neet to be designed to suit with their other roles, there's not really a lot you can do to alter the font.

Now, if you're making a character set, you can work around all of these issues, by being vague in shaping things, or lots of artists just draw a chair or a fish anyway. But there's no easy way of telling what tradeoffs the artist decided to make when they were designing the thing, what's going to show up in the wrong place, short of trying it for a while ingame.

So get a good character set. What counts as good depends on your tastes, and what you're willing to put up with. (so mine is the best, obviously. )

The list of user character sets is here: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_character_sets

The other main problem, in my opinion, is that most people prettying up the graphics tend to use 16*16 tiles, because that's what most creature tiles require. This size makes for the most readable creature sets, but everything else looks a bit off. The screenshots for 16*16 will usually crop out all the menus, and most of the character-set graphics - they'll focus on walls and doors and furniture - because monospace text doesn't really work at that size, and using square tiles exacerbates the problem - The base tileset uses 10*12 pixel tiles, and the more you shift away from that, the more stuff looks off.

So there's no escaping the matrix, really, because the game is designed to work with it. That doesn't mean that you can't make the most of it, though, and a good character set will make it a nice-looking matrix - so try a bunch of character sets and figure out what suits you.

The most important thing you should do, and the easiest thing you can do, is to switch out the palette. This improves the graphics more than any other change you could make. Anything that softens the colours is good. Importantly, use a 'brown' that is actually a shade of brown. The best palette I ever used is the one in the screenshot, above, which is something close to this:

[BLACK_R:30]
[BLACK_G:20]
[BLACK_B:10]
[BLUE_R:10]
[BLUE_G:60]
[BLUE_B:100]
[GREEN_R:30]
[GREEN_G:100]
[GREEN_B:40]
[CYAN_R:20]
[CYAN_G:70]
[CYAN_B:70]
[RED_R:110]
[RED_G:40]
[RED_B:20]
[MAGENTA_R:80]
[MAGENTA_G:30]
[MAGENTA_B:100]
[BROWN_R:80]
[BROWN_G:50]
[BROWN_B:30]
[LGRAY_R:85]
[LGRAY_G:100]
[LGRAY_B:70]
[DGRAY_R:70]
[DGRAY_G:70]
[DGRAY_B:50]
[LBLUE_R:40]
[LBLUE_G:110]
[LBLUE_B:240]
[LGREEN_R:110]
[LGREEN_G:170]
[LGREEN_B:50]
[LCYAN_R:40]
[LCYAN_G:130]
[LCYAN_B:140]
[LRED_R:220]
[LRED_G:60]
[LRED_B:50]
[LMAGENTA_R:125]
[LMAGENTA_G:40]
[LMAGENTA_B:130]
[YELLOW_R:250]
[YELLOW_G:180]
[YELLOW_B:10]
[WHITE_R:220]
[WHITE_G:220]
[WHITE_B:220]

But if anyone else has a cool palette, I want to see it.