Fake ASCII Tile Set

[Nomad]

Okay, this is an attempt at a fake ASCII tile set I've been fooling around with. I've mostly been using it to figure out what I'm doing and create a clean template for future tile sets, but it should be fully playable as it stands. It's intended to display at 8x16 font size, but the tiles are made 16x16 so it can be swapped in for the current 16x16 set in 3.1.2v2 without needing to mess with the source code. (With apologies to Adam Bolt!)

I've mostly tried to keep it true to the original ASCII, with a few minor tweaks:

- Clear and colour-changing creatures are represented by the standard ASCII letter with a different coloured border. (White with a grey border for clear, shades of green for disenchanters, shades of blue for multi-hued.) This is what a multi-hued dragon pit looks like:



- I've added the colour pink to the palette, which is used for chaos monsters, a few items, a couple of other cases where there were multiple monsters using identical red symbols, and to distinguish treasure in a quartz vein (pink) from treasure in a magma vein (orange).

- I also altered a few other colours and symbols in the name of making things easier to distinguish at a glance. Hopefully it should all be helpful rather than leading to any nasty surprises.

You should be able to grab the tiles from here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?u6dkkm8ai56k5

In theory there's both a Windows and a Mac version included, but I have no way of testing the Mac one so I can't guarantee it works. The Windows version has been playtested to the best of my ability, although I haven't been able to check all of the rare artefact jewellery, dragon scale mails or Morgoth artefacts. Also, note that this doesn't implement the green dot delineation of trap-detected areas, so watch out for that if you've got used to relying on it.

...I'm attempting to do about 15 new things at once in this post, so if anyone can have a go at testing this to see if it works, it would be much appreciated.

[kaypy]

I always did like fake-ascii as a display method...

Some suggestions:
More use of size and weight like with E would be nice
A rainbow gradiant might show multihued better than the blue.
I would unpurple the uniques and give them that aura you are currently using for multihued (assuming you gradient multihued)

Hmm I wonder if it would be possible to rig things up on the source code side so that alpha on the image works as transparent (ie pick the colour from the underlying tile)...

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Nomad

- I've added the colour pink to the palette, which is used for chaos monsters, a few items, a couple of other cases where there were multiple monsters using identical red symbols, and to distinguish treasure in a quartz vein (pink) from treasure in a magma vein (orange).

Pink, or variations of pink are already in vanilla angband colors. Look at the colors in options (one of them isn't actually visible in bottom row, the line goes from 1 to 27, 27 being deep light blue). There is Purple (which is close to pink), light pink and magenta-pink. Not pure pink though (whatever that is).

If you use same colors in that fake ASCII tiles it would make transition from real ASCII to tileset easier. No surprises then.

[Nomad]

Originally Posted by kaypy

More use of size and weight like with E would be nice

Yeah, I did want to try and do a bit more with that; I tried it with dragons as a way of distinguishing baby/young/mature, but I couldn't get it to look quite right. And I'd like to do something similar to distinguish scorpions and ticks from all the spiders, but then there's a risk of them getting mixed up with lower case s skeletons... I'll fiddle around with some attempts at different letter styles and see if I can get anything looking decent.

Originally Posted by kaypy

A rainbow gradiant might show multihued better than the blue.
I would unpurple the uniques and give them that aura you are currently using for multihued (assuming you gradient multihued)

I did try various different attempts at rainbow and multi-coloured initially, but the trouble is that on the scale of 8x16 ASCII letters you're talking single pixels stripes of each colour, and everything I tried ended up eyeball-melting psychadelic. I settled on the blues because it was the first thing that didn't give me a headache when I was looking at a whole pit of dragons together.

It definitely makes sense to give the uniques an aura though, so I might at least do that in a different colour while I keep trying different things for multi-hued.

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

Pink, or variations of pink are already in vanilla angband colors. Look at the colors in options (one of them isn't actually visible in bottom row, the line goes from 1 to 27, 27 being deep light blue). There is Purple (which is close to pink), light pink and magenta-pink. Not pure pink though (whatever that is).

If you use same colors in that fake ASCII tiles it would make transition from real ASCII to tileset easier. No surprises then.

Oh, that's a great idea. I didn't think to look at the non-standard ASCII colours; I really just picked a random shade of pink early on and then never got round to altering it. I might try and incorporate more of the other colours, too, since there's no reason this set can't use the full range. Thanks!

[Timo Pietilä]

How do you quote two different people? I tried to find an option to do that, but couldn't find any.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

How do you quote two different people? I tried to find an option to do that, but couldn't find any.

I don't know if there's a proper way. I just quote the first, then do a reply to the second in another tab and cut and paste from it.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

How do you quote two different people? I tried to find an option to do that, but couldn't find any.

You can just manually type the tags. That's the easiest way. If you want it to refer back to the original post, you have to do something like Nick suggests in order to get the post reference number.

  <quote=Timo> I could use something like this to make it look like you said something you didn't</quote>

where the angled brackets are replaced by the square ones of course.

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

Hello my name is Timo Pietilä and I didn't say this.

[Nomad]

Okay, here's version 1.1 of the tile set. New file's in the same place as before:

http://www.mediafire.com/?u6dkkm8ai56k5

I tweaked the pink so the hue matches the magenta from the ASCII (though I lightened it a bit because the full-on magenta's quite hard on my eyes) and added a few more colours from the extended palette. I managed to find a multi-hued effect I'm a bit happier with, so here's that dragon pit again with the new style, plus smaller ds for the baby dragons:



Uniques have stayed plain purple, however, since a lot of the capital letters turn out to be too wide to fit a border on both sides without a major redesign of the alphabet.

Full list of changes from v1.0:

- fixed incorrect mapping of beholders
- new multi-hued effect
- made the S symbol for ticks/scorpions different to the one for spiders
- made the j symbol for oozes narrower than the one for jellies
- made the d symbol for baby dragons smaller
- gave death molds a light blue aura
- made wolf chieftains, bone golems, bile demons, nightwings, nightcrawlers and nightwalkers olive green
- made nalfeshnees and gnome mages pink
- made mind flayers light blue
- made gravity hounds grey-blue