Dwarf Fortress’ graphical upgrade provides a new way into a wildly wonky game
There&#x27;s a certain ugliness that graphical-tile-based skins of over roguelikes and other TUI-iconography games have, that you don&#x27;t tend to see with graphical-tile-based games that were <i>designed</i> to be such — i.e. where the tiles and the tileset are a compression mechanism for scenes originally conceptualized without tiles. I&#x27;m quite sad to say that — at least judging from the screenshots here — DF&#x27;s graphical skin here seems to share that &quot;thin graphical skin over a TUI game&quot; look.<p>What I&#x27;m talking about here is best exemplified by looking at this image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;df4-1440x810.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;df4-1...</a> . There are two types of snow tile (full snow, and patchy snow) here, surrounded by grass tiles. The full-snow tiles are connected, RPG-Maker &quot;9-cell brush-texture&quot;-wise, as if they&#x27;re little dug-out ponds full of snow. The patchy snow tiles are all individual, with no ability to blend into one-another, and so end up looking like a bunch of individual objects on a clear grid — like ore deposits in a rock face in Runescape.<p>Neither of these (square-grid connected runs, or non-tesselatable one-tile blocks of varying intensity) is a good choice for depicting snow on grass. A graphical designer who wanted to portray the scene of &quot;a field patchy with snow&quot; in a tile-based game engine, would not create <i>these</i> particular visual elements as the primitives to depict said scene. These primitives are instead only used here because they are the ones that can have a 1:1 mapping with particular underlying DF TUI tiles.<p>I feel like it would be quite practical, if you were building something like this from the ground up, to write an algorithm to extract from DF&#x27;s raw tile data here, an &quot;elevation map&quot; of snowiness (heck, maybe it&#x27;s already a pass available internally in the engine, before it gets quantized out as tiles!); to do some smoothing over said snowiness-map; and then to have grass&#x2F;dirt&#x2F;sand&#x2F;etc tiles consume said &quot;snowiness map&quot; as a shader pass over their textures.<p>(I know that all this terrain is deformable. So what? Regenerating a 2D snowiness-map over a slightly-past-the-viewport crop of the tile data [i.e. a very low-res sample grid] would take less time than pressing the key to dig a hole. It could be done every frame, even.)<p>And you could do all sorts of other things like that — e.g. have the lava in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;df1-1440x810.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;df1-1...</a> be a flowing mass of liquid rather than a bunch of particular static grid tiles.<p>I feel like the only reason the developers of these graphical adaptations of TUI games don&#x27;t do this, is because they are trying — at least partially — to serve the part of the existing player-base who <i>prefers</i> the TUI version of the game; rather than focusing solely on the part of the player-base who doesn&#x27;t like TUIs but plays the game despite that, and the untapped market of people who aren&#x27;t playing the game <i>because</i> of how ugly and gridlike it is.<p>(And if you&#x27;re wondering, this sort of higher-level adaptation doesn&#x27;t have to be to the detriment of gameplay. &quot;The grid&quot; just becomes a UX feature, an extra lens and maybe an always-on fade around the player and&#x2F;or the cursor, rather than something evident in the design of the levels. Compare e.g. Sim City 2000 [evident grid] with SC3000 or SC4 [UX-layer grid] for what I mean here.)