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Author Topic: [UI] Dwarf lists are a mess, resulting in tedious scrolling. Ideas for solution.  (Read 703 times)

Orange-of-Cthulhu

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This is a problem that happens a lot to me - in situations where I want a particular dwarf in a particular squad or when I want a dwarf in a paricular bedroom r when I want to find a dwarf that just created a masterpiece.

Squads: I have atm 164 dwarves. So I create for instance a new lasher squad when I have gotten 10 whips together. I know I want Urist McUrist, weaver in the squad because he arrived a five migrant waves back with adequate armor, and I just didn't need him in the military before now. I know roughly where he is in the U screen because he is with the blue dwarves.

But when I want to put him in the squad, the dwarves in the list are sorted by how long since they arrived in the fort and not by job title - so I have to scroll up and down the dwarf list to find him, looking at all the names.

It is tedious - I think the UI should allow to find any given dwarf very fast, no matter which thing I want to do.

Bedrooms: Same thing. I want to move Urist McUrist, recruit to a specific bedroom because I want the military to have beedrooms as close to where fighting happens as possible. I find the bedroom I want him in, and again I need to search for him by scrolling up and down a list of 164 dwarves in order to assign him to the bedroom.

Solution: AT the very least all the lists should have the dwarves in the same order - so me it matters not which one, as long at is is always the same.

ALSO, I think the lists should be searchable. You might want to find a dwarf called  Be-something that was just in a fight. Just being able to type "be", and then getting a reduced list with all the dwarves with "be" in their name would help a lot to find the dwarf fast.

I think for some lists you need more options as well.

For the military list, I want to be able to get lists like "dwarfs who are not in a squad, ranked by their "total sum of levels in combat skills" or "level of armor user" or "level of fighter". And I'd like to be able to remove dwarf types from that list, for instance "remove all metalcrafters and rank the remainig dwarves by their total levels in combat skills" - it would enable me to just quickly realize my idea of making a new lasher squad, and I would not have to spend time on meticuosly making sure I didn't put an important blacksmits in the squad.

I think this needs to be in the UI. Can be debated endlessly how many search options you need. I think any seach/sorting options would cut the playing time spend on scrolling on dwarf lists a lot.

It happens a lot that I want to do something with a dwarf, and then abandons it because it takes time to find the dwarf. It can be I see a dwarf cooked a masterpiece, and I am like "whoa this guy should get an electrum statue in his bedroom!" But I don't bother because it takes too long time to find his bedroom on the bedroom assignment list.

It can also be for instance to take a sad dwarf and assign him to train an animal, because they might get good thought from training an animal they like.

Or you don't care about trade, so you want a very useless dwarf to be the broker. Then you could seach for "dwarf with the lowest amount of skills in the fort", and he gets the broker job.

So there's some potential gameplay that goes missing because the search is too tedious. At least for me. I guess other people have different stuff you want to do that they also don't because of the lists. Like if you wanted a military squad where everybody has high dancing skills. Something you feel like doing for some reason.

I don't know the exact best way to fix this, but the goal should be that no matter which list you have - the military one, or the one where you add people to be performers in temples and scholars, or the bedroom list or the one where you assign animal trainers and so on- it should be possible on ALL the lists to very easily find any particular kind of dwarf, and have some options to customize the lists according to the players desires.
 
It would make it possible to just do more things with the game. You'd have easier control of which individual dwarf does what. I think that would be a good thing.
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