Hey.

The main project we've been focusing on recently is the depiction of bodies of water. In Dwarf Fortress, that can mean a lot of things: still pools, rocky brooks, wide rivers, oceans, lakes, underground lakes, city sewers, and channel and cistern and noble-drowning facilities you produce in your own fortresses.

This is the current status of the rocky brooks.



We're using sixteen frames of animation, which is a first for DF, ha ha, and we might touch this up with some flow direction indications and variants. Dwarves can walk across these, so it's important that they don't look very deep.

This is a deeper, more opaque pool of water that the dwarves prefer not to drink from, but which can have turtles and moghoppers for the dwarves to catch, to add to their food variety and allow for shell crafts. Or to keep as pets. Or for your zoo terrariums and aquariums.



Here are the larger workshops - the kennels and the siege workshop. Many animals can be brought from a wild to a semi-domesticated to a tame state.

This is not entirely safe! But it is good to have mostly friendly critters running about the fortress.



Here are some minecart tracks! Build them with wood, stone or metal, or carve grooves into cavern floors or glaciers.



With the availability of wheelbarrows, it's not always practical to produce a lot of infrastructure just to cart off stone, but you can always use them to do routine hauls of finished goods, or let your dwarves take a fun ride. Take a ride yourself in adventure mode. Or fill a cart with rocks and crash it against an obstacle as an improvised boulder shotgun. Or use serrated discs. People always find a way to turn DF features into weapons!

- Tarn

Hi!

The main part of the game we've been updating for the last while is the tree display.

Way back when the classic game was first released in 2006, and for some years after, trees were simply a single text tile, an up arrow for a pine tree, say, and you'd chop them down and get a piece of wood. As the game progressed and got a third dimension of terrain, this became insufficient, and we moved over to multi-tile trees.

Even using text, growing and display these was a bit of a challenge. Here are our tree trunks from the text version:



Don't strain too hard if you don't see them, but spot the brown and white O's? Those are tree trunks down on the ground level. The first part we tackled was getting these displayed, and making sure they were distinguishable from the trunks of trees that had been chopped down. The artists accomplished this with foliage shadows and lively roots:



Now, once you go upward, the situation gets more complex. In Dwarf Fortress, there are thick trunks that can be climbed, heavy branches that can be walked across, light branches that can't be walked upon, and even groups of leafy twigs out at the very edges. Jumble all of that together in text, and you have the old display:



This is one altitude level up from the previous text picture. All of those tile types are there, but it's difficult to parse, to say the least. We wanted to make that easier to understand.

So let's take a look at one of our new trees:



We are going up and down the tree with the camera - the trunk branches north and south immediately, and then thins out as we move vertically, until only leafy twigs remain at the top.

When we put it all together in a forest, and move the camera up one level, we obtain the following:



There's still a lot to take in, but the trees can be distinguished from each other (the leaves of different trees don't touch each other. This is called crown shyness.) The 'trunk' tiles which cannot be traveled through all have a pillar to distinguish them.

So if one of your dwarves is scared up a tree by a wild predator, you'll expect to see them clinging next to a trunk or sitting on one of the heavy branches. On the other hand, if they are using a stepladder to pick fruit, you'll find them in the leafier sections without heavy branches where the fruit grows.

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- Tarn

Hello!

One of the main things we've been working on recently is updating the world map. As with almost everything in Classic DF, the world map is displayed using ASCII symbols. It looks like this:



This particular world is a medium sized 129x129 one (currently you can make a large world at 257x257, down to a pocket world at 17x17). If you haven't played before, even from the ASCII image, you can probably tell what is water versus land, and that the top is the icy part. And maybe find some trees and deserts. However, some of the other symbols are likely more difficult to distinguish, or maybe it just looks entirely unreadable.

Here is our work-in-progress graphical map of the same world:



The image is larger and square since we've moved from 8x12 ASCII glyphs to 16x16 tiles. There's still quite a bit to do with river mouths and wetlands and oceans and mountains and trees and so on, of course. But we've arrived at a point where it accomplishes the goal of making the world map more easily understood and thought it would be fun to share.

- Tarn

Hi!

Dwarf Fortress has a few hundred real world animals and some dozens of fantasy creatures, but the most distinct part of the bestiary is the critters that are generated by the program. These include forgotten beasts, various demons, night trolls, werecreatures, experiments, and others. It's a pixel art challenge to accurately reflect what is stated in the text, and our first step is the night trolls! The body positions are a bit restricted due to inventory and piece-matching requirements.



In other critter news, we also have visual distinctions between domestic animals like the peacock and peahen.



Here are some updated stockpile pictures, where signs distinguish the sort of stockpile (clockwise from top left: food, furniture, finished goods, lumber). Since it is an initial DF embark, the finished goods pile is mostly crutches and splints, for the inevitable. You also have a look here at the base level of DF's multi-tile trees. We're using the foliage shadow to clarify that this is the base of a tree and not just a trunk.



Finally, here is a windmill turning some axles and gear assemblies.



You can use such machines to pump water, mill grains, and turn rollers to propel minecarts. Power can be provided by windmills and water wheels, and vertical axles and gears allow you to transmit it downward into the mountain as well.

- Tarn

Hello again!

I hope everybody finds themselves well. We've been continuing to plug away on the graphics for Dwarf Fortress and have some more goodies!

Beyond the ASCII ramp pictures we showed earlier, one of the main problems with visualizing the map in Dwarf Fortress is that the Classic game only shows one z-level at a time. This might be a very thin strip of sloping hill, or just the bottom or top of a river canyon. Lacking visual context, players sometimes resort to sliding the view of the landscape up and down to form an image in their mind. Now, we can more easily show many elevation levels at once, through the power of having more than 16 colors!



This is much easier to read as a desert hillside. This is still a work-in-progress, and there's more we can do with the shading and tile boundaries, but the main obstacles are overcome.

Here's a small animation moving down three levels of the hill to see it in action:



We've been working on a variety of other improvements as well recently. In Classic DF, we used background color to denote planned furniture. In Premium DF, we can use transparency:



There is a finished room on the left, and a similar room in the planning stages on the right.

Creature graphics have also seen some additions:



Although Dwarf Fortress creatures always occupy just one tile (unless they are a wagon... or somebody is dragging their entrails...), we have an opportunity now to make the largest creatures at least slightly larger. On the left is a blind cave ogre, very large as you might expect. On the right, a gorlak, a small friendly head with tusks, arms and legs that occasionally takes up a profession like a poet or a scholar.

Expect them in your taverns from time to time!

- Tarn

Hello!

Okay, now I can show you what I meant about the graphical improvements last time instead of trying to explain in words, ha ha.

For reference, here is a hillside in Classic DF:

This is a cutaway view at one altitude. This view has been pretty confusing for new players. All you need to know is that it's a grid of uniform size, and the upward triangles are ramps. Dwarves can walk up those to the next highest level.

Here is a similar view in Dwarf Fortress Premium. First off, you can see the new graphical tiles displaying alongside the old to-be-updated interface instructions.

Our work from last time got us away from the Classic's DF uniform text grid. The artists have done a great job with preparing shadows and shading to indicate that those ramps go up, and not down. For any of its faults, the upward triangles did give us that, and now we have it here. We'll do some additional work later on in the process that further bolsters the three dimensionality of the game.



The ramp situations can get pretty complicated! There are still some shadows and situations to patch up, but it's going well. In the second image there, you can see some brown jasper gems in the lower wall, and some hematite ore striping the upper wall at one spot.

But that's not all we've been working on:

This is a small fort with a carpenter's workshop, log pile, and constructed block wall outside. Inside, we have a mason's workshop with a stone stockpile, some doors placed, a metalsmith's forge under construction, and a larger meeting hall. The dwarves have smoothed the walls in the meeting hall - they generally like smoothed stone better when it comes to the value they place on their bedrooms and so forth. By the end, the smoothed stone color will match the surrounding stone.

Here are some domesticated animals by a pool of water.


The artists are still way ahead of me, but I'll keep working to support all of their creations. The process continues!

- Tarn


Hey everyone! Hope you've all been staying safe and inside. <3

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Cheers,
Victoria