Graphical ideas for *bands

[Leon Marrick]

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This post covers only the presentation of graphics - by which term is meant both bitmapped pictures and ASCII artwork - in Angbands as a whole. It does not handle the broader topics of user interface, multimedia, the proper relationship between game and display modules, or what have you. Just pretty pictures.


The problem:

Tim Baker went silent something like five years ago. From that day to this, Angband coders have sporadically tried to jazz up the presentation of graphics in the game he, Adam Bolt, and David Gervais added such sparkle to. Setting aside individual efforts, and looking at the game most players actually see, we've failed more-or-less miserably. For a old-school player like myself, used to terminals and text, this doesn't matter so much. Yet graphics make a vital difference to the ability of our favorite game to win new players - and it is they who count.

Most coders, lacking anything like the skill of a Tim Baker, would prefer to see Somebody Rather Else take charge of getting the game to look better. As there appear to be no obvious saviors, let's see if we can't spend our wait time more productively.


A sampling of possibilities:

There are a variety of practical ways we can make the game look better using tools mostly available right now and with no enormous amount of skill. Three of them are:

1. Colored ASCII artwork using customized extended fonts
2. The existing 2D bitmapped graphics, presented more intelligently
3. Any of several diffent kinds of isometric views


Tempt you with some examples?

Ideas and example pictures may be viewed at:
http://www.runegold.org/angband/graphic_ideas.html


... Or, because this is an honest-to-God graphical forum, you can view them right here!



ASCII artwork

Roguelikes have featured ASCII artwork since they began, but several problems - lack of custom fonts, very restrictive font selection, and inability to flexibly use all the available application space) have stymied progress. These problems are beginning to get sorted out, making it possible for ASCII artists to do things in *bands they never could before. If people decide to push ASCII artwork some more, we could easily start seeing screenshots like this (note that this is an example of the possible, not of something currently available) :

Here we see a simple Celtic knot border, drawn in a 4x6 font. Imagine how cool Saxon-style beast imagery and Scandinavian pattern-work would be!

If that border is a little large for your taste, there is always the option of going 2x3:

This probably doesn't qualify as ASCII art anymore but it would certainly fit in well with such.


Better use of the existing 2D graphics

Adam Bolt's and David Gervais' 2D bitmapped graphics have been presented only crudely thus far. A small but helpful improvement would be to vary terrain graphics depending on what terrain was adjacent. For example, a forest could be thick and bushy in the center, but show individual tress at the edge. Water is an even more obvious candidate:

Here we see what is very nearly the most primitive possible way to make water look a little less like blue paving tiles. Since we were too lazy to check diagonally adjacent terrain, you see some minor visual artifacts (the arrow points to one).