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jeremyshannon / Exile

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https://codeberg.org/Mantar/Exile
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Graffiti pictograms need work #43

Open jeremyshannon opened 2 years ago

jeremyshannon commented 2 years ago

Pictograms were the first form of writing, and each symbol represented a concrete thing which is resembled, and only over time did they come to be more abstract. Our graffiti has some very good symbols like tree, and sun, and feet, some decent ones like lines and circles, suitable for drawing crude images, but there's no good symbol for fire, or water, or other things players care about, and there's a fair bit of space used up by things like four slightly different variants of a spiral. Better, less abstract pictograms are needed, and more of them.

Related, i'd like to add chalk, which is basically just soft limestone, and allow players to use that or a split piece of charcoal to make tally marks, 1-5, or maybe four sets per node for 1-20.

wizardofgcc commented 2 years ago

Instead of removing the more abstract glyphs entirely, we could move them to a different colour of painting kit. The comments in the graffiti.lua file suggest two more colours: ochre and charcoal. We could move most of the abstract ones to ochre, add more to white, and put tally marks in the black.

jeremyshannon commented 2 years ago

That's an excellent suggestion.

But should we add ochre to the clay, or red chalk to the limestone layer? Or is our "ironstone" actually red limestone already, since it occurs in the limestone layer? (The red chalk formations of England get their color from containing traces of hematite.)

wizardofgcc commented 2 years ago

Yea, I think ironstone should be used as ochre pigment. Adding anything would just be a disappointing discovery for older worlds: imagine discovering that to draw some symbols you need to travel to ungenerated land and mine some obscure mineral.

jeremyshannon commented 2 years ago

New mapgen is coming regardless, thanks to the "new biomes" issue, so people are going to want to move to new worlds or what-have-you. We might as well do it up right. Exile needs more things, and I don't want to make ironstone boulders even more valuable than they are now. If it's a choice between "make iron" or "make a fourth paint to have more symbols" only the rich endgame players will ever bother to make the ochre paint. Which is silly; IRL ochre is a red clay that's cheap and common.

What's more, one of the things the endgame needs more of is reasons to go off on an expedition. Why have airboats and teleporters if there's nowhere you want to go?

DokimiCU commented 2 years ago

Some project history:

I based many of the pictograms off real cave paintings. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJnEQCMA5Sg (Why are these 32 symbols found in caves all over Europe | Genevieve von Petzinger)

In hindsight, you are exactly right. That's how people are using them. e.g. I'd like compass directions (EWNS).

Balance issue:

I'd planned on using ironstone for red ochre, but you raise a good point about balance. Historically, I suspect red ocher wasn't "cheap", despite being unsophisticated if you will. Red ocher could be highly prized.

( Fun story. A Maori tribal history I was told as a child: One tribe came bearing many baskets of red ocher as a gift to another tribe. This was unbelievably extravagant. The guests were welcomed in. Turned out it was a trap. The baskets were full of dirt, with ocher only sprinkled on top. The guests massacred their hosts, and took their territory.)

" is our "ironstone" actually red limestone already"?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironstone It was the most generic sedimentary iron ore I could find that was both real, and not extremely obscure and confusing e.g. rattle stones. The name sold it. Iron... stone...

DokimiCU commented 2 years ago

Just dropping by to make a quick note:

I made some more pictograms over the Xmas break then forgot about it. https://github.com/DokimiCU/exile_experiments/tree/master/more_grafitti

Don't think I'll do anymore, but that fills a few gaps. :-)

DokimiCU commented 2 years ago

I was looking at the new v4 paint. Seems a couple of them got missed? The texture is there, but they are not registered.

Happy face was the obvious one. Maybe one or two others?? (maybe a "kiln" one. I done them a while ago, so it's hard to remember - I just noticed some are missing, seems to be by accident)

jeremyshannon commented 2 years ago

I had two glyphs for "kiln" between yours and one submitted by noodles, and I just went with the one I thought was clearer.