Bay 12 Games Forum

There just needs to be hotkeys for stuff, I have faith that Toady will get to that eventually. Using the mouse is specifically better for things like constructions. I ditched the wasd cluster so I can have hotkeys similar to the old version. I can hit bcw for wall pretty fast. I can hit bwfp pretty fast for a farm plot. Same for bdd for door and bfb for bed. And so on.

It infuriates me that I can hit p for stockpiles, and all that does is open the stockpile UI menu. I can't actually start designating a stockpile without clicking on the new stockpile button with the mouse.

It makes me incredulous that the search bars, on almost everything, aren't autofocussed, so you have to click them each time before searching.

My Christmas wishlist would be, in a rough priority...

Hotkeys for...
Navigating menus in general
Works orders
Workshops
Stockpiles
Military
Zones
Announcements, logs, etc
Nobles
Full keyboard cursor, with q and k like the old version
Everything else, like standing orders, etc

This would involve navigating the menus with keys, so it'll be interesting how Toady manages to do that without moving the map  cos at the moment, the menus don't modularly swap what wasd does. What I mean is, imagine a world where Toady has done all the hotkeys, you hit o for orders, hit (e.g.) s s s s s s to go to the 5th order. Is the map going to move 5 units South because you hit s 5 times? Insanity. Can't be easy for him. Would almost be easier to go to an old Git branch and force the legacy UI into the Steam version with a menu toggle for "Legacy UI mode" (hint)  I know I know, he said it was too much to maintain all that, but at least it would get us to shut the hell up  He must be going grey super fast listening to us complain all the time 

Seriously though, the old UI with the Steam graphics would be like, super sexy. Menu button with "Legacy UI Mode (Requires Restart)"? Yeah. I'd be on it like Sonic. I'd even patiently wait a half a decade for the Magic release so that he can satisfy all the old jaded cultists.

As a long-term player, I would like to move the map with 8426, choose an action (chop trees, build nest box, whatever), and use the same keys 8426 to move the cursor. This modal use of the same keys was present in 0.47 but seems to be unavailable in the Steam version. In the Steam version (which I enjoy immensely), if I bind map move and cursor move to the same keys, this is the behaviour: If I choose build nest box, and move the cursor, the map also moves, which while being slightly amusing, makes it impossible to use the same hotkeys. In 0.47 these two actions, map moving and cursor moving, were mutually exclusive. It meant that one could use the same hotkeys for these two actions. This meant that I could do something like this: move map 8426, dt, move cursor 8426, choose area, esc, move map 8426, bwl, move cursor 8426, build workshop, esc, move map 8426... and so on. I'm using the same keys so I'm not jumping around with my right hand or using a modifier with my left.

The Steam version is great! It has great music, QOL features, amazing art. And nearly there with the hotkeys. But not quite. This change would bring back that familiar flying-around-the-menus-at-speed-of-thought that was one of the things that was so immensely pleasurable in the legacy version.

(edit) well, there are other things to get there of course, like hitting i to inspect, q to focus a workshop or whatever... But I think that will come with time. It seemed to me that the above topic I waffled about was an omission in the fundamentals as opposed to an omission in the features, so to speak.

(edit edit) this is mostly because I want to get rid of wasd so I can hotkey with the left hand, perhaps a hybrid approach would be appropriate whereby map scrolling is just used intermittently with the middle mouse button, instead of trying to go full keyboard with a UI that clearly isn't designed like those old ncurses command line apps anymore. Well, there's lots of approaches and opinions probably.

Will this work with vanilla DF 43.05 if I merge the folders into the DF directory structure?

Right! Lots of useful information here, thanks a lot!

So, when I make the 256 sprite sheet which corresponds to extended ASCII, the game will colour this depending on the type of item which is allocated to this character (e.g. cherrywood is the same character as uh, I dunno, applewood, if that even exists in the game, but it's a different shade of the 16 base colours). However, I can have another sprite sheet(s) of my own colours and then allocate this in the raws to a particular creature.

So, hmm, let's say that I wanted to represent cherrywood with a sprite cherry.png and let's say that I wanted to represent applewood with ...an apple.png. This isn't possible to do, is it? Because in the game, these would both point to the same character? Or is there a mod for this?