{NPP} Feature request

On 2006-05-06, FatHam <nospam RemoveThis @address.invalid> wrote:
> Hello.
> Best regards.
>
> PS: What is the situation of graphics (tiles) development in NPP? There
> is now lots of carets, dots and percent signs on the screen after new
> terrain system addition? Is there any guidelines to develop graphics? I
> have edited 8X8.BMP and GRAF-XXX.PRF so that every aspect in dungeon's
> environment has it's own graphical representation, but my guess it that
> there has to be some more general guidelines to do that. Graphical tiles
> are (IMHO) very important aspect of the game, so something has to be
> done to keep these tiles updates. Suggestions?

Briefly, there is a file which maps items to a tile bitmap location, so
it is necessary to both add the offsets into the graphic file, and add
images to the graphic file.

I share the view that graphics are an important feature, and find the
congitive model I build in a graphical angband is more accurate, and the
visual differentiation allows me to build different stories behind each
monster more easily than letters. I'd love to "support" someone who
wants to update the tiles, but beyond making the edits, and possibly
doing scripting to disassemble/reassemble the tilesets, I don't think I
can offer much.

Our opinions of tiles as important are definitely minority views, at
least among angband developers. The NPP devs (Jeff and Diego) seem to
have at least tried not to break any tile functionality that already
existed, but I believe you won't find them interested in doing a lot of
work to improve tile support to fit the new features.
--
Grim. Grom. Grümmer.
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Andres Zanzani wrote:
> In data Sun, 07 May 2006 09:06:39 +0200, Mondkalb
><seoman_mondkalb.RemoveThis@yahoo.com> ha scritto:
>
>> As for graphics in general, just my 2 cents: I would never even
>> consider to play a variant without graphics. The ASCII "graphics"
>> make my eyes ache and it ist completely impossible for me to stare at
>> a black screen with tiny little letters und numbers for more than 10
>> minutes.
>
> for me is exact the opposite. Never played with graphics

For me it's something inbetween: my very first roguelike was Nethack
with tiles and without this version (Qt Nethack, which has by far the
best and only convincing tileset of all roguelikes IMO) I would never
have gotten into these new (for me at this time) kind of games. Years
later I learned the fun and advantage of playing in ASCII, not at once
of course (I needed ~1 week to get used to it) but then never went back
to tiles, other than just out of curiosity and dropped again very soon.

I think tiles are a good thing to pull real newbies into the game, but I
pray they never will be something what the majority demands, so that
ASCII support would be slowly neglected as a result.

Besides, on a small 15" monitor and a real Linux console (no framebuffer
which always was pretty blurry on my system) with the proper font, there
are no "tiny little letters and numbers" but big, crispy, living letters
and numbers which sometimes scare me to death.

R.
--
under redocoration.
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On 2006-05-07 08:29:05, Joshua Rodman
<jrodman RemoveThis @duckerDOTorg.fake.domain.example.com> wrote:

> On 2006-05-06, FatHam wrote:
> > Hello.
> > Best regards.
> >
> > PS: What is the situation of graphics (tiles) development in NPP? There
> > is now lots of carets, dots and percent signs on the screen after new
> > terrain system addition? Is there any guidelines to develop graphics? I
> > have edited 8X8.BMP and GRAF-XXX.PRF so that every aspect in dungeon's
> > environment has it's own graphical representation, but my guess it that
> > there has to be some more general guidelines to do that. Graphical tiles
> > are (IMHO) very important aspect of the game, so something has to be
> > done to keep these tiles updates. Suggestions?
>
> Briefly, there is a file which maps items to a tile bitmap location, so
> it is necessary to both add the offsets into the graphic file, and add
> images to the graphic file.
>
> I share the view that graphics are an important feature, and find the
> congitive model I build in a graphical angband is more accurate, and the
> visual differentiation allows me to build different stories behind each
> monster more easily than letters. I'd love to "support" someone who
> wants to update the tiles, but beyond making the edits, and possibly
> doing scripting to disassemble/reassemble the tilesets, I don't think I
> can offer much.
>
> Our opinions of tiles as important are definitely minority views, at
> least among angband developers. The NPP devs (Jeff and Diego) seem to
> have at least tried not to break any tile functionality that already
> existed, but I believe you won't find them interested in doing a lot of
> work to improve tile support to fit the new features.

As an 'angband' developer, I find graphic tiles are important for one reason:
they allow me to justify to my fiance, friends, colleagues what the heck I
spend all my spare time on. A screen full of letters, I have to apologise for:
a screen with isometric 256 colour graphics, I don't.

Having said that, Unangband is guilty even more so than NPPAngband of adding new
'stuff' and not mapping graphical tiles for this.

I am extremely conscious of this, and wrote (with much help from Mogami) a
graphical utility within the game that allows you to assign graphics to tiles
in a much more friendly way than the default graphic helpset. This has also
been adopted by Hengband, and includes the ability to scroll around the graphic
tilespace in 2-dimensions, and the ability to copy and paste tile assignments
from one 'element' (object / feature/ monster) to another. This adds on to the
improved knowledge menus in many variants.

The Unangband CVS also includes an auto-tile sizing feature, that means that the
main window will automatically adjust the ratio of tile to text size to ensure
as much as possible that none of the tile graphics are scaled away from their
default size. This is unfortunately only in Windows, as this is the only
platform I can test graphics on at the moment, and will be in the next release
of Unangband (0.6.1).

I have also got isometric graphics 'sort-of' working in Unangband on Windows.
I've detailled the drawbacks including horrendous performance, and constant
screen refreshes in another google post, but it is good for screenshots at the
very least.

I've tried to not to re-order the object / monster / terrain files, so that any
work assigning tiles in Unangband should at least mostly be useful in Angband
and other variants that haven't re-ordered these files.

Andrew
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