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[EnnPeeCee]

Alright, so three somewhat related suggestions here.  These ideas mostly come from me having played Rollercoaster Tycoon and thinking that some of its menus could apply to dwarf fortress and be a real help.

First, it would be nice if either in the units list, or in a new menu somewhere (maybe status screen?) there was more information on each dwarf, such as happiness rating, current status, and gender available so that you could see it all on one page and wouldn't need to go into each dwarf's page individually to check; similar to the current unit list's functionality of showing each dwarf's current job.

Secondly, not sure if this is possible or not, a menu that groups dwarves with the same (or similar) jobs together, so you can see how many dwarves are eating / sleeping / idle / canceling job: too injured, without having to count them yourself in the unit list.  Also, by selecting one of these groups, you could see which dwarves specifically are in that group.

Thirdly, I think it would be nice to have on the main play screen (perhaps next to the idle dwarves count) some kind of indicator of the average happiness of your dwarves.

If you haven't played rollercoaster tycoon or are having trouble understanding what I'm suggesting, I can post some screenshots of RCT as examples.

Just my ideas of how to help improve the quality of daily dwarven life.

[Creamcorn]

I just had an interesting thought. How about an option to make mini menus appear on DF when you wanted them to, kinda like the way GIMP handles windows.

[chucks]

Some that is very nice in games is for units to have a certain aura or a glow.  Basically, assign the temperature scale from -> blue <-> green <-> yellow <-> orange <-> red scale to indicate either varying degrees of happiness or health or status effect.  Perhaps have a very small line graphs representing hunger or happiness or health or energy statistics.  The aura would need to be reserved for one dorf detail of utmost importance, and you could get a quick summary page for all dwarfs sorted by various details.  Maybe even have a control at the top of the dialog to choose which column to sort by.

After all that hub bub, add a collection of summary screens of this design and design, and provide a common dialog to select from them all.

[Nesoo]

I had posted something similar to your first suggestion many, many moons ago. Apparently underline didn't exist on the old forum, since that part should read "{u}nit screen..." and not "nit screen...". And apparently I never found time to mock up some screenshots...

Anyway, I guess that could be one way to implement what you're suggesting. Any comments on that one should probably stay in this thread, though; no reason to go reviving a year-and-a-half old thread by responding to it.

Gender could probably just be put in a column before the name; all you need are the male and female symbols, after all, and putting it after the name would cause all sorts of headaches when you get to people with titles or long profession names, etc.

[EnnPeeCee]

I had posted something similar to your first suggestion many, many moons ago. Apparently underline didn't exist on the old forum, since that part should read "{u}nit screen..." and not "nit screen...". And apparently I never found time to mock up some screenshots...

Anyway, I guess that could be one way to implement what you're suggesting. Any comments on that one should probably stay in this thread, though; no reason to go reviving a year-and-a-half old thread by responding to it.

Gender could probably just be put in a column before the name; all you need are the male and female symbols, after all, and putting it after the name would cause all sorts of headaches when you get to people with titles or long profession names, etc.

True.  New columns or tab pages would probably be the best way of going about this.