Friday, November 25, 2011

Looking for ASCII symbol suggestions (and colors?)

After yesterdays great round of suggestions today I am looking for suggestions for the look of two things that did not exist in ADOM: Armies and ships.
What do you think - which ASCII symbol should be used to represent
  • an army moving on the overland map? Keep in mind that other moving special encounters might be added over time, armies might vary in size (from roving bands of a couple of tens to larger armies in the hundreds... more probably not as it would not add much to the game play but rather just slow down the engine). Also keep in mind that the majority of encounters still will be randomly popping up as in ADOM. Since the types of armies will not be endless colors probably will be used to differentiate the army type.
  • a ship moving/resting on the overland? Keep in mind that other crafts and varying boat types might be added (which could be differentiated by color).
Suggestions welcome as armies definitely will be in JADE 0.2.3 and boats hopefully will be in it (including the means to build boats yourself given the appropriate skills).

11 comments:

  1. For armies, a white or light grey hash symbol (#) comes to mind, as multiple of those fit together :

    ###
    ###
    ###

    Boats normally have an orientation, so the horizontal (-) or vertical pipe (|) symbols could be used accordingly (if I remember correctly, there are some thicker versions of those too). Since they will probably appear in water 'tiles', their color cannot be blue, but any contrasting color that could bring an association with a boat is fine : white, black, brown... whatever suits the type of boat I guess.

    But this raises another point : what symbols does JADE currently use (in all their color variations)?
    Is there a code-extract or premature manual that we can look at already?

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  2. I think the letter v would be a good representation of a boat because thats how boats look from a front view.

    For armies you could use the exclamation mark ! as it represents something that is dangerous and needs attention.

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  3. Capital A and S seem best to me. Symbols should be avoided so that they stick out from other map symbols.

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  4. I like v or V for boats and ships (brown and grey are the best colors)

    I also kinda like '.', 'o' and 'O' for armies of varying size. Color equal to the most common creature.

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  5. For ships with orientation can be v, ^, >,<
    Can you use Š and or š?

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  6. For armies, I think the symbol should depend on what the army is actually made up of.

    For example, suppose it was an army of gnolls, or an army led by a powerful gnoll.

    The symbol should be a brown 'g', as is normally used when you see a gnoll in a dungeon :)

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  7. @Lyle: Maybe as an extension of that idea, have a generic symbol for all armies but replace it with a race-specific symbol when your perception?/survival? is above a certain threshold.

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  8. I second notasquirrel's suggestion.

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  9. For army what came immediately to mind was A (dark green). For a ship it was definitely V (no specific color).

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  10. *stares at his keyboard*
    # could work equally well for armies or ships. Can't see anything that looks like a mast (t/T is closest), so I guess a V is most appropriate overall for boats. Sorry, ships - boats should be a little v, ships a big V ;-)
    I imagine seeing an army on the move from far away would resemble a cloud of dust, so I'm voting for # for that. o looks like settlements, * is dungeons... etc.

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  11. @anoddlad I'd like # on maps to still represent walls, so we can have a "Great Wall of China" world map feature :D

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