Freakazoid_ posted:

Good looking trees, but the mountains still need work.

quote:

We've mentioned trees a few times here and showed a few foliage shadows back in April. Starting with that, this is what the lowest level of a lightly forested area looks like currently:



There are saplings and shrubs there as well - we have some specific shrub tiles now, but these species are still generic. As I mentioned before, the initial challenge was to distinguish trees from stumps, and this was accomplished with the shadow and some general liveliness. Of course, as you know if you've played the game, what lies above presents entirely new challenges!



That gif has the view going up above a tree and then back down the branching trunk, showing each of the thickness levels a basic 1x1 DF tree can present - trunk, thick branch, thin branches, and twigs/leaves. In ASCII, the thin branches use the 1/4 symbol, but here they indicate which direction their parent branch/trunk is. Thick branches can be walked upon, so they have to be reasonably wide, whereas thin branches do not support a walker, and so are much more fragile looking. On top of that, trunks can grow sideways but are not walkable, so needed to be distinguished from thick branches. This is accomplished by use of a trunk pillar in each of the trunk tiles, while the trunk tile still indicates its possible horizontal parent and children.



In ASCII, you can sometimes tell adjacent trees apart based on flowers etc. but more often it is just endless touching leaves. Here we have several leaf tiles depending on adjacency, which allowed the artists to attain the phenomenon of crown shyness. Not all species do this in real life, but in the game, it allows players to more easily distinguish which tree they are looking at, so we're using it everywhere.

We're still in various states of handling thicker trunks (highwoods can get up to 3x3!), trees without leaves, growths on trees (fruits etc.), other species of trees, and the more exotic cases of underground mushrooms and evil/good trees and so forth.

Zesty posted:

Posted by Mayday about the problems they are experiencing with trees.



"Worse than Minecraft trees. We're discussing extending the trees look code-wise."

Captain Invictus posted:

I reallt, really love the amount of thought they're putting into this. I didn't even know crown shyness was a thing, but that's fascinating and works great for distinguishing different trees ingame, too.

Pharnakes posted:

Imho tree stumps should be coming to a rough point, instead of a nice flat circle. After all they've been cut down with an axe, not a saw, so that would both look better and be easy to distinguish from a live tree.

quote:

Mayday: Hey guys! For DF "deluxe" we're facing a problem of having roughly 1500 undead sprites to create. There's no way for us to handle all of that for the initial release, so I've devised a "placeholder" edit that shouldn't take more than a few seconds for each sprite.

quote:

"Harpy boobs, yea or nay?" - Mayday



"oh wait, poo poo, she was supposed to have no arms"



"Going to need to rework this."

quote:

quote:

"unique dead vermin sprites"

Zesty posted:

Hope people don't mind me posting what I find hidden in Discord and the forums about the Steam release work.

Popete posted:

I am so hype for Steam Dwarf Fortress. I haven't played in probably 5+ years and it's looking incredible.

Pickled Tink posted:

Gods. I think I heard that part of the reason Toady won't implement something like that is because dwarf fortress players are such irredeemable monsters that drowning traps would take on a horrifying new dimension.

PMush Perfect posted:

I believe it. Didn’t he get so squicked by people making mermaid bone farms that he made the value single digit?

Siljmonster posted:

I've never even seen a mermaid.

Mokotow posted:

Seems like I was lucky and he didn't infect anyone, I just have to deal with his rotten carcass.

Pharnakes posted:

But he's a hostile, you can't coffin hostiles can you? Shouldn't get a ghost off him either I wouldn't think, if you really can't dump him maybe build a quick drawbridge and smash him might be the easiest.