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[Nimbby]

Okay, I have long loved Dwarf Fortress for the interesting ways it generates worlds, and as a poet, I love to understand my surroundings and describe them, but I never really did understand what the array of ASCII trees and hills looked like to my character, I would like it if I were able to have my surroundings described to me in some fashion or another, with something more like:

You stand in a forest. Grass is packed densely everywhere. Small shrubs can be seen occasionally. The trees are tight-knit. Animals dart along the ground, including rabbits, badgers, and spiders.

As opposed to:

Here is an aspen tree. Here is a patch of dense rye grass. Many small creatures have been disturbed. Some rats.

I also understand that this would require the grammar rewrite to fully be realized, but I think it would be a good drive to explore, as finding new regions and wonders could motivate one to constantly find new places. So let me know what you guys think, also I did a quick search for "view" and "description" and looked at the dev log and didn't find anything similar, but if this has already been suggested or already planned then tell me.

[jfs]

This would be pretty cool yes, and certainly make the screen easier to read, since essentially the game reads the screen for you.

The problem is that it requires the game to read the screen! This may not as much be a problem in a pristine world (where it could simply store some key points about the landscape along with the actual map) but it becomes a problem on sites where the player has worked, either when visiting an old fortress or when establishing a camp in adventurer mode, as seems to be in planning.
The game would have to be able to tell that there are structures about, maybe take note of patches or even paths of lower grass density, and what about more or less hidden entrances? It would be bad if the game accidentally revealed something to you that was supposed to be hard to find.

[Nimbby]

That's a good point, I intially was thinking that the viewing system might be more for simple natural features, like a random place near a river that you entered as an adventurer, and I also supposed that upon site generation detail data could be saved for the site, depending on what was generated, but I don't see a way it could translate the purpose/look of player built structures.

[peskyninja]

Fellow dwarfs, lets try to do not enter in the territory of scripted scenes/sounds/descriptions! (Leave that for CoD fans  )

[peskyninja]

This advanced view should work like this, IMO: It should use the same information that you see when you are embarking on a site (Metals, vegetation, rainfall, elevation, evil, temperature...) so it should be easier to implement than if it describe objects around the adventurer.
So based on that information the game would generate descriptions similar to this: You're standing on a plateau, you can see that rained recently and there are lots of trees

[Nimbby]

I think that something simple like peskyninja described would be nice, since a touch of narration is good, and could be useful for a lot of environmental understanding, perhaps even determined by an attribute or skill? Although I think there should be an option somewhere for some more aesthetic descriptions, so that a role-playing adventurer can feel even more like he is in the amazing world DF creates.