After a long time lurking hare and playing dwarf fortress I thought it's about time I registered here. And what better time than now, when I have a suggestion?
I guess this falls under the Interface Arc which I know is pretty far in the future, but anyway... My suggestion is a new screen that better summarizes your dwarves current state/thoughts/jobs/etc. I you have ever played one of the Rollercoaster Tycoon games, what I was thinking of for DF is something similar to the peeps tables in those games. It's a bit more visual than normal text tables because each of the peeps are represented by his/her face. For those not familiar with Rollercoaster Tycoon i'll explain a bit more...
You have a new screen called "Dwarf Overview" or something like that which is divided into subscreens (kind of like the z menu): Jobs/Mood/Thoughts/Health etc.
For example selecting Jobs will simply show all of the dwarves as their normal ASCII character icons with their correct job colors, next to each other, sorted by job. This makes it easy to get an overview of your job situation, for example to see if you have enough recruits compared to your total population.
Selecting "Mood" will show "Happy (6)" followed by the icons for those happy dwarves (the six representing the number of dwarves). "Exstatic (12)", "Fey (1)" etc. This will be sorted by the most common mood at the top.
"Thoughts" will show for example "I saw a dead body recently (45)" followed by the icons for the 45 dwarves that had this thought. "I was amazed by a masterfully crafted statue recently (15)", "I hate cats (7)" etc. This makes it easier to detect problems in your fortress.
I would like this more visual type of dwarf overview, but of course a text only overview would also suffice compared to what we have now... nothing except individually checking each dwarf yourself.
Author
Topic: Dwarf Overview (Read 687 times)