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[Ziusudra]

With the addition of parties and the ability to control multiple characters, announcements that just say "You <whatever>" can be ambiguous and confusing. This is exacerbated by the fact that when you switch to another party member, the previous announcement is still shown if it was not dismissed.

With the way it currently seems to be coded, I think the easiest solution would be to have every announcement include the character's name; e.g. "You (Urist) ...".

Edit: and the status screen just says "You" but there you can hit 'd' to see which you you are.

[yxe]

+1

I believe the game should be as explicit as posible in order to be comprehensible. Easy to read and follow the storytelling.

this opens the following retoric questions: if you start a game with a party, are "you" the party ? do you identify yourself has one of the game characters ? or if some party member dies do you keep playing ?

So, the game could be vague enough to allow us to feel it as we want, but it should be understandable from any perspective that it propose.

for me some examples could be
<party_member_name> Im starving.
<character_name> says something to [ ALL ? / Urist / you ?]
<strange carpenter> says <msg> to <receptor of the message>

[Atarlost]

This isn't an adventurer mode specific problem and the solution shouldn't be specific to that mode.  Names should always be used if available.  If "the werepigeon bites the hammerdwarf in the nose, tearing the skin."  I don't want to have to go through the combat events of all of my hammerdwarves to figure out which one I need to dispose of.  Less urgently you get these epic battles between forgotten beasts if you seal off explored caverns, but the description is unintelligible because there's no indication which beast is doing what. 

[NW_Kohaku]

I believe the game should be as explicit as posible in order to be comprehensible. Easy to read and follow the storytelling.

Just keep in mind that being explicit and being easy to read and follow the storytelling can come into conflict quite often in DF.  How many dwarf descriptions can you read and actually keep all the contrasting bits and details in your mind?  How many descriptions of bites that scratch the fifth hair of the second knuckle of the fourth finger of the left hand of the first pair of arms of a dwarf does it take for you to just start skimming over the incessant repetition of extremely dry details until you start to skim so much you jump over the important parts because your brain can't sort out any signal in all the noise?

I definitely agree that names should be used, but names in DF can also get to be a lot of noise, especially when there are two readings of every name (English and the fictional language version) and a lot of creatures start to put on additional titles like accessories.

[yxe]

@NW_Kohaku, what you say its true too, someone may want more details about the character and other less, and more detailed about the action itself, or more focused on something else.

sounds like that could be kinda customizable at some level, or that could be fixed by design, or moddable.

allowing something thing like this: <creature_name/creature_id> <does/action_id> to <receptors_id>

being <any> entities that could be fully accesed (by the mod) allows to show whatever the mod has configured.

I had not deepdive in modding for DF, maybe that things already exists.

[Starver]

I keep thinking this might be best dealt with by new-UI developments, and hypertextual summation.

Spoiler: In long... (click to show/hide)

Internally, the game knows that the speaker (or spoken-to) is "#entity314159", knows that this entity is "an elf" with a given name it can give, may know that this is the last (if not only) elf to speak and so can be "the elf", in context, maybe know that this elf is darker skinned than #entity271828 who has since been assigned "the other elf" etc, etc.

As such, there can be a (semi-)intelligent wording to reflect "An elf: 'l'm starving'" and then "The lighter elf was inevitable!' to the darker elf...". The underlines (or other highlighting, or hover-only highlighting) would give hovertext hints as to additional details, as required[1], and right-click options to artfully reconfigure the treatments[2] given to this particular identification, that are also available (in advance of any cue speech) from the sprite.


Some of these bits of suggestions might have been influenced by my experience in a MUD with a very advanced system (mostly for commands) that allowed "kill first dog", "kiss tall man" or "take filligree ring from second backpack; examine it ; wear it" that NLPs your intent (of all dogs here, the first / of all men here, the (first) one described as tall / the first ring of that type found in the second backpack being worn/held, which can be be identified as 'it' until demoted by future targetting). This level of parsing-complexity of input isn't even an issue under DF, just some (semi-)smart understanding of what would be a sensible constructed version of description to present the player. Perhaps the simplest/shortest of the choices that remain unambiguous[3], which would mean speculatively juggling the various hard-coded options but presenting just the one that seems most apt (dynamically influenced by existing player-prefs in general and notes player-selections specific to this encounter) in the player interface.

For any text logs, of course, it'd have to leave permanent "The dwarf (Urist McUnfortunate, Peasant) was hit by the spinning vomit." or whatever non-barebones format might be usable. Maybe it can be reconfigured to/from just explicit names&titles, but don't expect it to retroactively relog, so might be safer to stick with a single sufficiently identifiable default.


[1] Perhaps even pop-up a summary of this specific entity's entire conversation-log so far, as addresser or addressee (for singular or group utterences).

[2] Identify by full name, configurable nickname, "<Race> #<number>, etc. Force a conversation-following sub-window (like the suggested pop-up in Footnote1, but additionally with player-DMing capability so long as the range is valid to broadly shout/normally talk/confidentially whisper a player-style response to them.

[3] Or not critically ambiguous. "A dwarf says:" for the first dwarf to have said anything, in an encounter, may be acceptible/preferable shortening to give, prior to the player conversing with "the dwarf" and establishing that this is "Urist McUristname the Legendary Pump Operator", not "Urist McOtherurist the (Dabbling) Mechanic", aka "the second dwarf", but practically indistinguishable/undifferentiatable to the recently arrived human adventurer in most practical ways.