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[PaulMurrayCbr]

It would be nice to see the dwarf skills and job assignments as a scrollable grid. The columns for job preferences could be organised hierarchically following the existing menus so that you could collapse/expand the hunting-related category and see individually which dwarves are doing what in more or less detail.

[Boea]

I do believe it has been suggested at length at least once, and the UI Overhaul is going to be at least delayed until more major features of the game are implemented. Or rather, it's down the line.

[JanusTwoface]

Dwarf Therapist can do that. It's not built into the game, but honestly I'm not sure how well that even *could* be done well in a text based interface.

[rhesusmacabre]

DFHack now comes with the Dwarf Manipulator plugin that does just that. It can be accessed from the [u]nit screen with [l]. It works pretty well, but you need a small tileset and/or large screen to get the most out of it (though you can zoom out if necessary).

[GreatWyrmGold]

One thing that I always try to mention in threads about UI is the reason Toady delays it.

Major updates relating to whatever aspect of the game is associated with the UI will require changing the UI. This means that, by the end of the game, a bit of UI implemented in the beginning will either have been tinkered with umpteen times or completely replaced at least ones. Neither endless tinkering nor periodic complete replacements are ideal, so (AFAIK) Toady intends to get the game mostly done, then worry about the interface once it won't need to be changed again.

[NW_Kohaku]

One thing that I always try to mention in threads about UI is the reason Toady delays it.

Major updates relating to whatever aspect of the game is associated with the UI will require changing the UI. This means that, by the end of the game, a bit of UI implemented in the beginning will either have been tinkered with umpteen times or completely replaced at least ones. Neither endless tinkering nor periodic complete replacements are ideal, so (AFAIK) Toady intends to get the game mostly done, then worry about the interface once it won't need to be changed again.

Actually, incremental tinkering is ideal, so that entire line of argument is invalid.

Much of the problem Toady has with interfaces is that he doesn't understand them because he doesn't want to deal with them, and he thinks he can just solve it all in one go at some undefined point in the future, and he's kidding himself if he thinks that.

Spoiler: long version (click to show/hide)

I'm not talking about "refining the interface", nor "an overhaul", I'm talking about building an interface that works for the game we already have, and making each new chunk of code have an interface that actually works when it comes into the game.

Working on the interface constantly and in small, iterative steps is the only practical way to handle the game.

If we are the alpha testers of this game, we need to have access to the information that is being passed around in the game to know when things are going wrong.  (Or are we to believe that we are not in an alpha, and we are to treat everything in the game as though it is a finished product?)

Further, if you step away from the false dichotomy choices of "the only alternative to doing everything now is doing nothing now", you can easily see many things that need to be done for the long-term for the game that would be of great benefit, now, and could be kept without scrapping later.

Cursor memory, implementing basic scripting commands like the Standing Orders suggestion (which was the top ranked eternal suggestion, along with many other interface tweaks in the top ten like automining veins), putting in simple keypress links between information-gathering modes, working on ways to put information on the same page as the decision pages, and developing the automation and autonomy of the actions of the dwarves in general.

That last part, especially, will never be completed in a single thrust, and understanding the quirks of how it is (and will be) built will have a dramatic impact upon how the game is designed going forward. 

You can paper a GUI over all the bare gears in the engine later in some big "overhaul" if you want, but the basic mechanics for the interface need work now, and when you've done a proper skeletal interface, you can actually have a much better grip on not only how the game works, but on how the player will eventually approach the game.

Don't lie to yourself - the way that you see the game now significantly colors the way you actually think about or do things.  Playing the game by Stonesense means caring about things far different from things you care about when you play the game normally.

I'm probably one of the very, very few players who actually builds multiple vertical shafts to compact my fortress vertically, rather than spreading out the fortress in a bunch of huge, clunky rectangle rooms specifically because players only view one floor at a time, and the digging tool favors rectangles.  Central staircase designs are a direct artifact of the current interface. 

If you change that interface, you change the way that players approach the game.  How?  You'll have no idea until after you do it.

We rely almost entirely upon hacks and micromanaged tweaks to make the game work in its current state - if we are ever going to get a game that works properly, Toady needs to start work on understanding how the player should be controlling their dwarves... And right now, Toady really doesn't have an earthly clue.  He can't even give a committal answer on how much autonomy or direct control players even should have over dwarves in general. 

In fact, the longer Toady puts off understanding how to build an interface, the worse it will be for him to fix many of its problems, for much the same reason that putting off fixing bugs and building more systems on top of the bugs only makes the bugs far more difficult to fix.

Besides which, by these measures, why should Toady be implementing goblins and sieges into the game now when he's just going to change how sieges work in the future?  Or do you like having them in there to be able to enjoy playing the game?

What about raws?  Rawifying everything will take a long time, but the more Toady works on making sure that all his new things are in the raws, the easier the eventual rawification of the game will go, because so much of the rest of the game is already prepared for being transitioned.

It's a bizarre double standard to say that we should encourage Toady to make complex systems, but asking that we actually be able to see and interact with those systems is somehow too much of a burden upon him.

The case of the eyelashes is an especially egregious case of a fetishism for simulation without practical interface - if nothing in the game interacts with that mechanic, if the player can never see it, if you can't even notice whether that mechanic is even there or not, why, exactly, is it there, eating up memory and processor time every single tick counting down to the next time when the hair will grow another millimeter?  (And it was bugged, and nobody ever even knew it until memory hacks revealed it over a year after it was coded in! Toady never even bothered testing or figuring out a way for anyone else to test it.)

This is the perfect case example of what not thinking about the interface will produce - a perfectly useless mechanic that merely exists to eat processor time.  That's why thinking about the interface at every step along the way is the only practical way to code a game.

In fact, there's little stopping Toady from going into allowing full "graphics" like with creatures, instead of being limited to two colors. As far as I can tell, he's mostly just too attached to the hard-coded tricks he put in when he was trying to be clever with the not-really-ASCII; For example, the " sign used for kobolds in the darkness turning into a ' when you put out an eye.

Meanwhile, if he simply embraced layered graphics, you could actually do something similar with graphics.  Again, you can just have a "single eye" graphic and a "both eyes" graphic.  It's just not "clever" if you use the proper tools for the job instead of trying to repurpose fonts into images, that's all.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Incremental tinkering is a bit of a vague term...

If you're tweaking each little bit a little whenever you need to to keep the shiny bit of UI functioning (as opposed to redesigning it each time), you end up with something...well, something roughly analogous to the human body, with its recurrent larengial nerve and its poorly-placed prostate and the eye and all of those issues which make Creationists squirm. In my humble opinion, it would be better to keep a minimalistic UI shell over the innards of DF until said innards have finished their development, rather than have an overcomplicated bunch of UI or a lot of time spent on UI which we don't really need to play DF.

Obviously, once the game is built, whatever interface is there can be carefully deconstructed and a new one which fits quite well constructed, but this takes time and forces tinkering with new features, and so should probably be delayed until the innards are finished.

[NW_Kohaku]

The problem is, you're conflating "shiny new interface" with "an interface that actually performs a vital mechanical task of providing the player with information they need to make decisions". 

Once again, there are tons of low-hanging fruit like sortable lists that won't need significant changes over the life of the game, because we won't ever need to stop sorting the lists.  It also doesn't take much time to create sortable lists or, for that matter, introduce the mechanics to make such sortable-lists easily extensible with essentially no effort on the part of Toady.

In fact, the same exact argument can be made against things being put into the raws - and yet Toady does take the time to put things into the raws, even though such code is much more likely to eventually be overwritten than interface code.

You can, in fact, also say the same thing about bugs - why fix bugs, when you'll just create more bugs later?  Other than, you know, compounding bugs on bugs makes previous bugs much more costly to fix, and makes them significantly harder to isolate in the first place.  If Toady doesn't think about how the interface works, he will get less and less able to ever fix its problems.

You're throwing out an abstract fear of needing to make everything perfect at all times as a reason to never do anything to alleviate the serious problems at hand - it's like saying that there's no reason to ever take a shower because you'll just get dirty again, later.  And what the current interface has doesn't just smell, it's getting to be an infection that is plaguing many aspects of the game.

[JanusTwoface]

I have to agree with NW_Kohaku. There's a reason that I played DF exhaustively for a few months straight but can't even bring myself to start a game now: the interface. The cost/benefit ratio is just too low for me at the current point in time. There's so much information there, but it's a pain to get to most of it (and a good part of it isn't accessible at all without external tools). Which is a shame, because I really love the idea of Dwarf Fortress in theory. I see what it is and what it still could / will be. But I just can't get into it any more.

Maybe I'm in a minority here, but the problem isn't going away. It's just getting worse. That's one reason why there seems to be more and more DF-likes every day--and one thing all of them seem to share is more of a focus on the interface. None of them can compete directly with DF in terms of features--it's pretty hard to overcome with a ten year head start. And Toady has a pretty unique position / outlook that lets him focus more on DF than any of the other devs can focus on their games.

I don't know what the solution is. Or even if most people would agree there is a problem. But if Toady continues to put off the interface until the game is otherwise 'done', we're never going to get an interface. With the list of features planned just for 'version 1.0', it's going to be decades away at best. And the list keeps growing.