R
Rhoark
Guest
I tried the new client for the first time last night, and here are my thoughts so far:
#1 This is the second best the game has ever looked. (The best was the first few years, despite the technological backwardness, because of the monolithically consistent art direction, 1:1 pixel mapping, and the general expertise in pixel art characteristic of the time.) While I like the terrain and replacements for later art, ideally these could be placed alongside the most original artwork for the original monsters. While pixies, unicorns, ki-rin, and juka are undoubtetly looking better, daemons, liches, gazers, headless, orcs, etc still look best in their original incarnations.
#2 Leading off the above, the continuous zooming feature is nice, but it would be nice to have a quick one-button way to set the zoom for 1:1 mapping of art pixels to screen pixels for maximum visual clarity.
#3 Gumps are incredibly inconsistent in visual style and functional interaction. There are at least 3 window themes regularly encountered: classic, a sort of classic-like stone-textured theme, and the translucent boxy style. These should be preferred in basically that order, using classic gumps whenever they can still serve their purpose, and with the translucent boxy style hopefully going away. Using boxes for book contents, rather than the actual pictures of books from classic, is particularly tacky. Also, every gump should be able to be dismissed with a right click, which is currently a crapshoot.
#1 This is the second best the game has ever looked. (The best was the first few years, despite the technological backwardness, because of the monolithically consistent art direction, 1:1 pixel mapping, and the general expertise in pixel art characteristic of the time.) While I like the terrain and replacements for later art, ideally these could be placed alongside the most original artwork for the original monsters. While pixies, unicorns, ki-rin, and juka are undoubtetly looking better, daemons, liches, gazers, headless, orcs, etc still look best in their original incarnations.
#2 Leading off the above, the continuous zooming feature is nice, but it would be nice to have a quick one-button way to set the zoom for 1:1 mapping of art pixels to screen pixels for maximum visual clarity.
#3 Gumps are incredibly inconsistent in visual style and functional interaction. There are at least 3 window themes regularly encountered: classic, a sort of classic-like stone-textured theme, and the translucent boxy style. These should be preferred in basically that order, using classic gumps whenever they can still serve their purpose, and with the translucent boxy style hopefully going away. Using boxes for book contents, rather than the actual pictures of books from classic, is particularly tacky. Also, every gump should be able to be dismissed with a right click, which is currently a crapshoot.