Yes, there was some discussion of this a while ago in the FotF thread, and it got
spun off to its own thread to take it out of there...
Anyway, I get the suspiscion that a (q)uery building would probably be something like the shops from the old economy that sell things to your citizens, but which sell to the travellers that stay at your fort. You'd probably have minimal control over what they actually sell, picking only some broad category of "make this a clothing shop".
I've been
pushing this for a while, but, in the old Sierra City Builder games like Pharaoh, trade was generally accomplished not by having some big trade screen, but by just setting up a trading wharf or warehouse, and having a screen that said "sell up to ___ pottery each year to this partner at ___ price", or "buy up to ____ bushels of wheat at ____ price" with an arbitrary limit on how much they were willing to buy or you could sell or you could import.
I do think that an interface similar to a stocks screen or maybe a stockpile, where you could designate general types of items for sale in general would be the best way to go, although maybe that will just be split up so you have to make a specific "these are the clothes you are allowed to sell" type of store menu.
If we do get this, though, I hope we have some sort of "don't sell this specific item" type of button, though. Selling the hoards of pig tail socks my sweatshops churn out or random pottery is fine, but there might be certain diamond-encrusted, engraved-with-dwarves-cutting-elves-in-half-the-elf-is-pleading-the-dwarf-is-laughing glazed pots that I might just want to keep around for sentimentality's sake.
As for a specific menu, z-menu makes some sense, but there ultimately DOES come a point where the z-menu becomes just a little crowded. That is, unless we just make the screen have several lines of sub-menus coming off of it. Spinning off or reorganizing other menus might make some sense. The nobles menu is fairly anemic, and the jobs manager screen has to be accessed through the units menu.
Spinning things off into an "administration" menu would be one solution, where we could throw the jobs manager in with it, along with maybe taking the Animals, Kitchen, and Stone menus with it. Then, administrative decisions are in one menu, and more status-based menus are in another. (Of course, having some way to key over between those menus would be helpful, like hitting (z) to go to the status menu from the administration menu and back.)
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Topic: Ideas for Tavern UI (Read 1157 times)