Four words: Dear GOD, that’s awesome!

It’s not exactly news that Dwarf Fortress has a pretty poor graphical interface. ASCII graphics are tough enough to interpret, but in DF, not only is that “d” actually a dog, but it’s also on a hill that is higher than the ground to the left but lower than the ground to his right. It becomes pretty impossible to mentally visualize our fort in 3D when we’re looking at the game world as 2D slabs, one stacked on another, unable to see more than one z level at a time.

This technique, however, allows you to view multiple levels are once. Lower levels are gradually darkened out to denote depth. There is even a little animation that plays whenever you raise or lower the level. It feels natural and I would be willing to be it’s infinitely easier than redoing the graphical engine.

A small change like this would go a long way to the readability of DF…and for most new players, that’s one of the largest hurdles to jump over.

Toady…make it happen!

Natural:

Brick:

Personally I’m not quite sure I’m ready to move on from the Mayday graphics pack,
but RantingRodent has done a great job keeping this set iconic and very readable, but still maintaining a “clean” style. Also, according to the author himself one of the key goals for the tileset was to modify “all of the stone, soil, ore, and gem tiles so that you can tell what you are looking at a lot more easily without having to check with ‘k’,” and we can all get behind that, right? Check it out:

Bay12 Forum Topic

DF File Depot Link