Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack,misc.misc (
More info?)
Paul Chernoff wrote:
> I was wondering if someone could tell me how to
> use one of the other tilesets that comes with
> nethack. The regular is usually far too small for
> me to see clearly. Thank you.
As with "all things NetHack", the answer is
complicated. For one thing, it is at least operating
system dependent, and perhaps even hardware
dependent.
One short answer, if you happen to be using
MS-Windows, that will upgrade you from the default
16x16 to nicer 32x32 tiles, is:
Go here:
http://www.nethack.org/v343/ports/download-win.html
and follow the directions in step 5.
One thing that step 5 does _not_ tell you to do is
to assure that tiles are _turned on_, in your
configuration defaults file (called "defaults.nh" in
MS-Windows); make sure your configuration file
contains a line like:
OPTIONS=map_mode:tiles,scroll_margin:5
and doesn't have some conflicting map_mode also set.
I happen to set my scroll_margin to something more
like "9", which keeps my character pretty much
centered in the screen in tiles mode at my tile size
and my screen resolution; for very slow computers,
this might not work well.
If you need even larger tiles, perhaps to cope with
limited vision or whatever, I'm currently using
some 56x56 ones scaled down from the 128x128 ones
found here:
http://www.aesthetictech.8m.com/Absurd.htm
128x128 only gives you a small viewport into the
level, less than 6x8 grid cells on my screen, but it
sure helps if your vision is fading. Unfortunately,
it doesn't run under Win98SE (but did under
WinXP.SP1, before that hardware broke for me), due
to the huge data volume of the bitmap, I guess.
I tried 64x64, but my old version of MS-Windows
won't support even that much image data, or
something.
The wonderful tool The GIMP:
http://www.gimp.org
let me do the scaling. You can just as easily use it
to scale _up_ a copy of your current set; if you use
Image=>Scale Image, and choose "Cubic" as your
interpolation mode, it does a very creditable job.
One well hidden, rarely notice, plain _wonderful_
feature of NetHackW.exe, the version of MS-Windows
NetHack that supports tiles, is that you can play
the dull parts of the game in "almost-ASCII" mode
(there are a couple of neat extension characters
from other-than-Latin alphabets; the fountain looks
like a shepherds' crook), and see the whole level at
once, toggling back and forth to "tiles" mode with
the F5 switch whenever things get interesting, and
especially in shops, or to see if your pet cat is
now a "Large Cat".
Tiles mode does have a few downsides as well besides
the obvious one of less context map visible than in
ASCII mode; in ASCII mode, many corpse types are
differentiated by color that in tiles mode all use
the same tile; you can't tell a dead lichen
(delicious, to a monk) from a dead kobold (poisonous
to a human tourist), for example.
HTH
xanthian.
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