Hello again!
I hope everybody finds themselves well. We've been continuing to plug away on the graphics for Dwarf Fortress and have some more goodies!
Beyond the ASCII ramp pictures we showed earlier, one of the main problems with visualizing the map in Dwarf Fortress is that the Classic game only shows one z-level at a time. This might be a very thin strip of sloping hill, or just the bottom or top of a river canyon. Lacking visual context, players sometimes resort to sliding the view of the landscape up and down to form an image in their mind. Now, we can more easily show many elevation levels at once, through the power of having more than 16 colors!
This is much easier to read as a desert hillside. This is still a work-in-progress, and there's more we can do with the shading and tile boundaries, but the main obstacles are overcome.
Here's a small animation moving down three levels of the hill to see it in action:
We've been working on a variety of other improvements as well recently. In Classic DF, we used background color to denote planned furniture. In Premium DF, we can use transparency:
There is a finished room on the left, and a similar room in the planning stages on the right.
Creature graphics have also seen some additions:
Although Dwarf Fortress creatures always occupy just one tile (unless they are a wagon... or somebody is dragging their entrails...), we have an opportunity now to make the largest creatures at least slightly larger. On the left is a blind cave ogre, very large as you might expect. On the right, a gorlak, a small friendly head with tusks, arms and legs that occasionally takes up a profession like a poet or a scholar.
Expect them in your taverns from time to time!
- Tarn