DF2014:Custom grid

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Dwarf Fortress allows you to increase the grid from 80 tiles wide by 25 tiles high to as many as 200 by 200. The resolution and font are still a critical concern and must be calculated to match, to avoid strange results and crushed fonts.

Choosing a grid for a font and resolution combination

1. Choose a font, know your resolution
2. Determine your tile size.
   • A tile is one character, with its background, as displayed on screen.
   • For the font you've chosen, they are usually named for a target screen resolution, or are named for the tile size... given neither, you could determine based on the dimensions of the font image itself:
     • If the font name contains a large pair of numbers, it usually means the target resolution for 80 columns and 25 rows. Example: curses_800x600.bmp indicates that its tiles are 800/80 = 10 pixels wide and 600/25 = 24 pixels tall. In this particular case, the tiles are actually 12 pixels tall but look good when doubled to 24 pixels tall.
     • If the font name contains a small pair of numbers, it's usually the tile size. Most new tile sets use this, like Tahin_16x16_rounded.png indicating 16x16 tiles.
     • If you're not sure, you can examine the tileset image, which uses 16 rows and 16 columns of tiles. Simply divide each of the dimensions by 16 and you'll have your tile size. For example, if an image was 144x128, you'd have a 9x8 tileset.
3. Divide your screen resolution by your tile size to get your target grid, rounding down.
   • Example: screen 1600x1200 and a 16x10 tile. 1600/16 = 100, the number of 16pixel tiles you can fit horizontally. 1200/10 = 120 10 pixel tall tiles you can fit vertically. For this example, you'd use a grid setting of [GRID:100:120]

Notes

• The title screen will be situated in the top right of the screen, instead of centred.
• Setting [TEXTURE_PARAM:LINEAR] instead of [TEXTURE_PARAM:NEAREST] will make squished tiles better looking.
• Tile squishing won't be necessary if you choose a font and grid that multiplies directly into the target resolution. It can also be avoided by dividing the grid by an integer. For the example above, you could safely use [GRID:100:60], which would simultaneously halve the number of vertical tiles, and double the vertical height of each tile.

Notable Combinations

• [FULLSCREENX:1920], [FULLSCREENY:1080], [FONT:curses_640x300.bmp], [GRID:120:45] (640x300 is 8x12, but used doubled as 16x24 per tile)
• [FULLSCREENX:1600], [FULLSCREENY:1200], [FONT:curses_640x300.bmp], [GRID:200:100] (640x300 is 8x12 per tile)
• [FULLSCREENX:800], [FULLSCREENY:600], [FONT:curses_640x300.bmp], [GRID:100:50] (640x300 is 8x12 per tile)
• [FULLSCREENX:1920], [FULLSCREENY:1200], [FONT:curses_800x600.bmp], [GRID:192:100] (800x600 utilized at 10x12 per tile, for an almost square aspect ratio with lots of view space)
• [FULLSCREENX:1280], [FULLSCREENY:1024], [FONT:{any 16x16 font}], [GRID:80:64]
• [FULLSCREENX:1680], [FULLSCREENY:1050], [FONT:{any 16x16 font}], [GRID:105:65]

Windowed combinations

• [WINDOWEDX:1272], [WINDOWEDY:960], [FONT:curses_640x300.bmp], [GRID:160:80]

External links

• DF Grid Calculator - A javascript tool to help with the above calculations.

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