Hi ho! I’m not a developer… but I’m a big fun of roguelike games and especially TomeNET – online multiplayer roguelike game. After I first time tried TomeNET (and had YASD lol) two years ago, my dream was to make it more ‘readable’ – so player could recognize dangerous monster asap and make right desicion – to fight or to run In TomeNET it’s very important, cause it’s ‘real-time’ roguelike (actually it’s also ‘turn-based’, but turns are very fast and based at FPS (https://tomenet.eu/guide.php?chapter=4.14).As Angband tileset system which TomeNET used once, doesn’t work for over 10 years, we can not use traditional ‘graphic’ tileset and everyone had to play ASCII-only… But in one of the past updates, TomeNET devs did great job and added another way – possibility to assign different font glyphs to any object in the game; so it became possible to create pictures of different monster/terrain in raster font which TomeNET using – to create custom pseudographics font (https://www.tomenet.eu/guide.php?chapter=2.5a).
I’ve spend several weeks at this project and you could watch over my progress in my videos:
It was started with this video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQzfWXgM_i8
And ended ~ with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hRF0LMh7KM
Also I’ve made half of my ’tileset drawing’ videos at my second, russian youtube chennel Anyway, just in case if someone interested in process:
http://youtube.com/Tangaria — my streams in English
http://youtube.com/StreamGuild — streams in Russian
So.. After some time tileset was created and I was amazed how much more comfortable became TomeNET gameplay. It gives players possibility to ‘read’ game situations very fast. For example, in TomeNET there are loads of different ‘D’. Some of them quite harmless (dragon turtle lol), some – devastating (Ancalagon the Black). By default you could recognize different ‘D’s by color and certain flickering pattern, EX:
Guess, who is who?
In my tileset I’ve designed 10 different ‘D’s (8 for regular ‘D’ and two for bosses):
…which are easely recognizeble – so after you see them, you would certanly understand – is it dangerous for you or not. Of course a lot of monsters (TomeNET got 1100+ different mobs) have the same glyphs, but ( color + flickering + different type of glyph ) gives enough information to make fast decisions Idea was – to make special glyphs for the most dangerous monsters which are essential to recognize among others.
Also I’ve made all game bosses (hello, Morgy!) looks unique, not just being ‘letters’. ~50 unique 1-bit pictures shared among 200+ bosses. Not bad! We have limitations – can’t use more then 256 glyphs (font format limitation); also currently we got an unknown bug which doesn’t give possiblitity to use 24 glyphs… If it would be fixed one day (it’s my dream!) we could add 24 more unique monsters and terrains.
So…What more could I say. You have to try it in TomeNET! It’s very unusual feeling to see a ‘graphic’ boss among his ‘letter’ minions hehe. Very special roguelike-feeling Now when I have YASD, I’m very glad to start again and again to meet all previously slain ‘glyph’ bosses surrounded by ‘letter’ minions once more 8D I feel something special when playing with this tileset.. Maybe it’s because I designed it by myself, don’t know
As TomeNET using raster fonts, it’s not possible to resize it fast, I’ve created different size brackets for different resolutions: 10×16, 12×18, 14×20, 16×24, 17×25, 19×29… I mostly using 21×31 for 1680×1050 and 24×36 for 1920×1080 (27′ screen).
Actually it’s not only graphical font, it’s also ‘normal font’ with custom fantazy-style letters which I draw from scratch and it could be used at websites, presentations and other places Feel free to use it!
I share this tileset to all devs, without any limitation and obligations – just my small contribution for all hours of fun which I had playing roguelikes, starting almost 20 years ago with NetHack, when I was 12 y.o. boy and got my 1st English lesson writting down translation of word ‘dagger’ to my russian scratchpad!
I’ll be very happy if someone would use this tileset in YAGR (yet another great roguelike)
Details:
Tileset name: “Tangar’s tileset” // I wanted to call it ‘TomeNET tileset’, by didn’t get approval from devs TomeNET is very rigorous game with rigorous devs
How tileset looks like:
Tileset designer: Tangar Igroglaz – http://tangar.info
Special thanks to:
Lightman (Monster list scripting, glyphs port)
Kimsoonsung (monsterID calculation formula)
Used materials for modification from tilesets:
Kimsoonsung – http://tomenet.eu/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=880
David Gervais ‘TomeTik tiles’ – http://pousse.rapiere.free.fr/tome
RLTiles – http://rltiles.sourceforge.net
LICENCE:
‘Tangar’s tileset’ project is in public domain; you are free to use it however you like; but it would be very nice if you would give a credit to TomeNET and put a link to http://tomenet.eu 🙂 Thank you!