ASCII/Retro tilesets

[system]

Wow. Much DF-like. Very Good. Many 16x16.

[nikola]

I really like this tileset.

I think the solution presented by HRose is very straightforward. However I suppose that a successful tileset would expand the number of tiles beyond the (ascii x colors) because some tilesets that are more graphical than symbolic will demand more sophisticated merger between the game logic and tiles.
Whatever road will be taken I really would like to thank all of the people involved.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

Bump for very nice tileset.

What’s really needed is the same approach Dwarf Fortress uses. ASCII tile page of default tiles, and any existing graphics overlayed on top of that, if they exist.

I.e., say I make a new Zombie variant creature, and represent it with a dark gray Z. No graphics exist for that creature. So instead of drawing a “missing tile” graphic, or fumbling around for a default tile, the game would use the ASCII page index of ‘Z’ - that’s 91, if I’m not mistaken - then find the 91st tile in the assigned “tileset”, apply the proper color, and draw that. Same for anything else.

Separating graphics tiles from regular tiles is normally a hard process, I’d imagine, but in Cataclysm’s case it’s pretty much already done. All you need is add a page of ASCII characters of matching dimensions to the graphics tiles used, and everything will immediately work. If a graphics tile exists, it is drawn - and if it’s not, it’s taken from the ASCII page.

[RoguelikesEsp]

Hello.

Your tileset is just awesome, i love the retro fresh air that adds to the game, but the tiles of some zombies (fat zombie, decayed zombie, etc) don’t appear (well, yes, they appear, but not has a tile, they are a “#”).
¿What to do? Please, help.

[FunsizeNinja123]

I don’t think he’s maintained it over the course of several months, which means that it’s not updated.

[Natures_Witness]

I would love to see this up-to-date again, is HRose still around? If not, maybe someone else could update it?

[Antistar]

Funny you should say that…

I’m very new to CDDA - only on my second character, even if he is lasting a good long time (my first didn’t survive the first day) - but I’m hooked. Loving it. I’ve been using HRose’s tileset basically since the start, and loving it too; it’s gorgeous.

I couldn’t imagine playing without it, but I also couldn’t stand it being unfinished, so I started adding to it myself…

I’ve been drawing from Trihook’s charset - same as HRose - and adding my own new tiles as well. The plan has been to replace tiles that were scaled down from Deon’s tileset (I think it was) in HRose’s version - you can’t really make those out, as they are - and to give everything a graphic tile, rather than an ASCII character. And to add in missing tiles, of course.

It’s been a lot of fun, actually; I’ve maybe added more tiles than were in there originally (not counting ASCII characters and stuff scaled down from Deon’s), though a lot of that is clothes and weapon items. It wouldn’t be possible without HRose and Trihook’s great work as a base, though.

I’ve been trying not to spoil things in the game for myself too much, so what I’ve done mostly only covers what you’d see around town. I’m also using version 0.9 stable. So there’s still a lot more to add. It’s an awful lot of work; I can see why HRose wanted some changes to tileset support.

I can share my version of the tileset, if no-one has any objections. It would seem sort of a shame not to. I imagine it would make sense to make a new thread if so, and give the tileset a new name as a kind of offshoot. I don’t want to tread on HRose’s toes too much.

I could put it up on the Nexus - you may know me from my mods for Fallout 3 and New Vegas there in fact, if you’ve played those games.

As far as permissions go, credit would be nice I guess, but for the part of it that is my work at least I’m fine with it being used however and wherever.

[Natures_Witness]

This looks AMAZING! Please share what you’ve done, I’m sure a lot of people would really enjoy it.
BTW, I loved the weapon mod kits for Fallout 3, definitely one of the essential FO3 mods.

[FunsizeNinja123]

Well Antistar, you could continue this.

[Antistar]

Thanks.

I’ll give it a bit of time in case anyone does object - and I am still working on this pretty heavily - but I might be able to put out what I’ve got so far in the next day or so.

[phaethon]

Really nice work, Antistar. Can’t wait to use your additions.

[Antistar]

Just waiting to hear back from HRose. Looks like he was last online a few days ago.

I’m still adding stuff every day, anyway. Added a bunch of medical items yesterday, among other things. Next up will be some vehicle parts I think, since my character is at the point where he’s turning an RV he found into a ‘SupeRV’.

[FunsizeNinja123]

Few days ago huh? Haven’t seen him in forever.

[Inquisitor_Dust]

Awesome! Glad to see that you’re going to continue the tileset.

Oh, and I checked out your nexus page and I run a few of your New Vegas mods… Er, used to. Haven’t played in a while. Still, it’s cool seeing you here!

[Antistar]

Okay, it’s been a while. I’ll probably share my version of the tileset soon. I want to do some more work on it today, so maybe after that.

If HRose does object, then I can take it down I guess. Or he can use anything I’ve done in my version in his own version, if he likes. Same goes for anyone, really; I’ll release my psd file for this too.

In any case, look out for a new thread sometime soon.

[HRose]

As far as I’m concerned I’m not doing any more work until devs support the features I’ve asked (as I’ve said again and again).

Since it won’t happen you can do whatever you want with what’s left. My attention is elsewhere.

[KA101]

A quick check of your posts indicates that you’re not happy about the lack of SDL support. Seen that Chase-san guy around? He’s got an update to SDL2 in the pipe, which’ll land as soon as we’re back in experimentals.

Rivet and I both work Windows; unfortunately we don’t do SDL, but in my case at least that’s because I can’t get it to work on my system. It’s possible the SDL2 upgrade will fix that.

Thanks for checking back in, in any event.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

I can also confirm (having IRC’d with the guy in question) that his SDL branch with support bitmap ASCII sheets. At least, that was his intention as far as I gathered.

In the meantime I’ve managed to persuade Chase, the maker of the recent tileset editor here, to add an ASCII tile generator to his program, and while it can’t generate proper ASCII-sheet tiles yet, I have already used the generator’s output to pad this tileset (well, actually the RetroDays tileset) with most of the missing tiles, hand-replacing the tiny scaled symbols with tiles from HRose’s colored ASCII sheet. I’ve only got as far as creatures for now, because holy crap there is a lot of tiles, and I still made some mistakes here and there because it’s hard to make out the white/light grey/light pink colors in bicubic-scaled tiny letters.

[CIB]

Just PR’d something that might help: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/6349

It’s much more generic, though. In high detail tilesets like Waldo’s, ASCII fallback and colors wouldn’t be very useful(would look very out of place), so I went for this solution first. There are solutions more specific to iconic tilesets like this one that can be implemented. Namely, falling back to ASCII instead of “unknown”, and color-swapping combined with grouping(so you could, say, have a single zombie sprite, then have it automatically color-swapped for you depending on what the color of the zombie is in ASCII).

I don’t think carrying over the meaning of letters into tilesets is a good idea, though. Like, say, two monsters using “M” as ASCII character, should not lead to them sharing the same sprite in the tile version. Rather, semantic groups(like species) should be used for that.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

[quote=“CIB, post:139, topic:3676”]I don’t think carrying over the meaning of letters into tilesets is a good idea, though. Like, say, two monsters using “M” as ASCII character, should not lead to them sharing the same sprite in the tile version. Rather, semantic groups(like species) should be used for that.[/quote]That problem only exists in Dwarf Fortress, as far as I know, where non-graphics tiles are limited to the 256 ASCII symbols. Here, the two are combined and every creature can have its own tile regardless of what ASCII letter it was assigned. Even with the generated ASCII page like the one I linked, different creatures with the same ASCII symbol still have different tile ID’s on the sheet.

Also, very neat feature. It will indeed make the high-graphical tilesets a little more uniformly detailed with their undefined graphics.