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[Merlon]

Some new buildinterface options became more easily implemented with the introduction of the new contracted material list. Here are a few that occured to me. Apologies in advance if any of this is allready planned or has been discussed to death earlier.

New general buildingmaterial categories
Since buildingmaterials have no quality it doesn't matter to us which stone (etc) we use for construction, we don't know which one in particular we're selecting anyway. With that in mind it would be benificial if we had additional categories to the new system, like "rock", "light stone", "wood", etc selectable on the top of the list of buildingmaterials. This will significantly reduce the amount of scrolling and clicking. Perhaps especially handy when you consider the amount of new basic buildingmaterial types that will become available in future versions.

Simplifying the construction process
With the above simplified we could further reduce clicking if the placement and material steps were combined in a single menu. None of the keys conflict, so why not? It could look like this for instance:

The highlighted material or materialcategory will be used upon pressing enter. In the case of materialcategory it should use the nearest valid items.

Let the buildmenu stay up
This in turn should allow the buildmenu to remain up at the same page and material after placement, reducing repeated clicks allowing easy and rapid repeated placements. Furniture, rewalling and 1-tile bridgemosaics would benefit greatly.

Since furniture has qualitymodifiers it should simply highlight the next piece on the list after each placement.

What about larger structures? (bridges etc)
Since structures of 2 or more pieces of material have the potential to require more material than is available in one selection on the list, it would be nice if we had ie. the secondary selectors increase/decrease the amount as we select materials.

Here's how it could work: For some reason I want to build a 3x5 bridge out of mainly wood, but I have only 3 logs. So I highlight and increase the wood category's value to 3 (the number now changes to red to indicate max). I should now be able to see on the bridge itself (yellow X*) and on the materialsmenu that I'm still missing some material (yellow number) to be able to construct the building. Luckily we have some rocks about, so I highlight the rock and either increase that number or simply push enter to construct using the previously tagged material with any shortage filled in by the highlighted material.

*Could be simplified as displaying the whole bridge in yellow, but that won't show how close you are to reaching the materialrequirement.

Here's another picture, please don't mind the inconsistencies like beeing outside with a retractable bridge...

What do you think? Feel free to discuss other means as well.

[Reign on your Parade]

That's quite clever.

[mickel]

Good idea. I approve too. The existing interface is in dire need of improvement, and your suggestion is better than anything I can think of at the moment.

[Toady One]

Part of the reason placement occurs at a different time than material selection is just a speed issue.  To get those distance lists and detect which materials are accessible from which side of the structure and so on, it needs to do quite a few calculations.  I don't think combining placment and material selection would be worth the cursor lag.

edit: also, for people reading this thread, if you haven't seen the Mule video, the building interface has changed and looks somewhat like the pictures in this thread rather than what it looks like in the current version.

[ August 29, 2007: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Merlon]

The distance part was just based on the interface in the Tragedy Mule story of yours. Poor creature, great video.

Cursorlag certainly is difficult, but with the new contracted categories for materials do we really need to know the distance each step, or at all? As far as I understood, given some time to calculate, the game will select the nearest after placement anyway. Should help a bit?

Does the current game keep track of connected areas? If so the available materials in one spot would naturally be the same as in any connected area. This could connect to a given burrow's material list?

If not, then if the requested (walkable) cursortile is connected to the last selected (walkable) tile by a walkable path there's no need to recalculate available materials. If on top of that you could make the available materials list calculate asynchronously when a recalculation is needed, then there would be little lag?

Sorry, I'm mostly "running around babbling" at this point. All that repeat rewall clicking in said Tragedy Mule story made me feel sad for the people that do thoose giant mosaic pictures at the DF map archives.

Edit: Sorry, I did intend to link to that video in the first post. Must've disappeared in one of my "un-Engrish"-edits beforehand.

[ August 29, 2007: Message edited by: Merlon ]