Wow, I had no idea it was still going to be like that in the final Steam version. It looks more like an amateur overlay someone could have cranked out in a month than a years-long project. Frankly that jank makes me prefer the original graphics. At least you expect single glyphs to blink around.
It was communicated from the start what the Steam version would look like. But also they significantly sped up world generation and built a graphical UI, among other things. That alone is a good reason for me to prefer "that jank".
> It looks more like an amateur overlay someone could have cranked out in a month than a years-long project
We both know that's not remotely true. They're not even done drawing all the graphics yet and that's not exactly because of laziness. And on the technical side this is a game built over 20 years without animated graphics in mind.
Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask? I'm no master developer but comparing two X coordinates and picking a left-facing or right-facing sprite seems like the kind of thing computers are good at.
> Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask?
DF has over ten intelligent species, countless animals and other creatures that include oddities like weresloths. Should all of those be drawn in different orientations? There is a lot of variety you could add graphically based on, say, a dwarves' current activity, mental state and so on but you have to draw the line somewhere if the game is supposed to actually release.
They did make some other improvements like a less cryptic graphical representation of terrain.
From what I've seen a lot of the development work for the Steam release was about reducing the technical debt that accumulated over the years and now just had to be paid in order to integrate new features and improvements.
Then why draw them facing left instead of facing out like the smiley face?
Should all of those be drawn in different orientations?
Literally all you need is a single mirroring. Left and right. That's enough so your characters don't spend half their time moonwalking. It looks ridiculous.
Because (1) they originally used the '' character. In ASCII, the cat is 'c'. Does it bother you that it doesn't turn around?
Does it bother you that they aren't facing up/north? Why not?
I can't say I've ever heard anyone complain about 'sliding' or 'moonwalking' before. Mostly because they're just disappearing from one coordinate and appearing in the neighbouring one.
>Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask?
For one character, probably not, but if you have 200 dwarfs and a large goblin raid is flooding your gates with about as many units you now have another coupling between the logic and UI that must be tracked bringing your fortress closer to FPS death at earlier stages.
If you take a look at their blog[1], you might realize that the Steam release is about more than slapping on a texture pack. AFAICT they overhauled most of the UI.
