Alright so first time in the forums, and by extension, first time interacting with the modding community at all. Also, I've finally come back to Dwarf Fortress since 0.34, and damn, have things changed!
But mostly Dwarf Therapist, which no longer felt quite right. Specially with all the new layouts and the weirdly arranged jobs.
So, after reading the help file and finding out why the changes (whose logic I don't quite agree with), I guess the old layout has been completely deleted.
So, I set after recreating and modifying the old layout, mostly using the in-game menu as reference (which sort of matched what I remembered, as well as the old screenshots I found).
Now, here's the thing: Grid layout customization is buggy, and painful to work with.
First off, you get two panels, left for job groups and right for the jobs in a group. You can rearrange the order of jobs, and the order of groups, in a simple drag-and-drop motion. Yay, basic functionality!
Not so happy after something as intuitive as dragging a job from the right panel into a group at the left panel. No easy one-click, one-drag option this time. Instead I had to right click the offending job, click again to delete it, click to get into the other group, right click to search the job in a labyrinth of menus and click again to have it be there.
Like, using an already existing layout is something that's being encouraged, with the COPY option, and moving jobs from one group to another would be the most common modification!
Also, forget about using the DEL button to delete stuff, nah, you gotta right click first.
But let's keep going. Remember the menu labyrinth? There's a nice rule of thumb in GUI design that says that there should be 5-7 elements in a drop down. Well, the right click menu has 20 elements, with lots of sub-menus that will more often than not ignore said rule, often looking similar! Good luck not confusing roles with labors in a menu that will move around as every right click, thus having to navigate some more.
And really, all of the operations there are done often enough that they shouldn't be locked behind that useless, additional right click. Can't they just be moved into a toolbar or sidebar of sorts on the left, with like, nice, shiny and easily accessible buttons?
Like, say, an "Edit" button, a "Delete" button, a "column category" drop down, and the actual column drop down?
Let's say I want to build a new group of columns, labor columns, so I only need to set the column category once, and then choose the individual columns. Want to add weapon skill columns? no problem, set the column category to weapon!
But as it stands right now, it's like I have to set the column category every time I add a single column. Plus an extra right click. This HEAVILY discourages creating a grid from scratch.
Then there's the spacers. If you're using them, you'll want to play around with them. Make this thinner one, make this one bigger... This color doesn't quite work... And hey, when you're playing around with stuff, it's only logical that you get immediate, visual feedback of your changes, instead of being forced to close the preview and open it up again every time you increase a single pixel in that spacer until it's just right.
While we're at it, having a color selection menu easily available instead of behind a double click, and then three extra clicks. So let's have that too. And now that we can separate color editing from name editing, and since you can delete multiple selected columns, let's have it so you can change the color of multiple columns all at once!
But, now, that's where all the bugs come in.
For starters, spacers being named "SPACER", "SPACER 1", "SPACER 2"... on creation will turn into " ", "1", "2" the next time you open Therapist. Sure, it's not that bad, but I really doubt that was intended. And it's terribly ugly when you have numbers and "SPACER" mixed around in that list.
Then there's the issue of color. Change a labor's color? No biggie, now it's the color you wanted it to be, forever and ever. Want to change a spacer's color? It'll be gone next time you open Therapist. Seeing all the work I had lovingly poured into making a nice grid I enjoyed suddenly gone wrong is making me seethe with rage, in case you hadn't noticed yet. Like, dude, why do you hate spacers so much? Don't deny it, it's made clear in that help file, and in the default labor layouts. I can understand the points you made in that pdf about spacers being useless, to you; but I do like them and I do want them, so don't leave glaring bugs like this around.
There's also a really weird issue were sometimes editing a column will make the changes on some column at the first group, instead of wherever you were, working, and also taking you to said first group. Damn, it feels great to feel dumbfounded for half a second wondering why there's way less columns, and why all but one are white instead of just changing the color of whichever one you were editing!
But hey, that looks like a hard one to pinpoint, so I guess it's sorta ok.
Now that I'm done rambling about the grid layout editor, let's move on to superlabors. They're pretty neat. I was pretty sure old Therapist had, like, additional columns to toggle all jobs in a group for a dwarf. but haven't found any screenshot featuring that. Fever dream or not, that would be pretty nice and it's easy to implement with said superlabors. I know you can do that with a right click, but I think I've already made clear my opinion on right clicks
But managing superlabors is terrible, too. There's like this long list of labors to choose from, and no way to cross-reference the labors in a superlabor with other superlabors, to prevent duplicates. It's not fun moving spinner to farming, changing the farming and clothesmaking superlabors, move spinner back to clothesmaker, update the clothesmaker labor and some time afterwards try to figure out why all the new farmers have spinner enabled.
Yeah, something more visual would be welcome, maybe some sort of grid, with like, labors as columns and super labors as rows. Not sure were I might have seen that before, huh?
But really though, I don't know if its spaghetti code you're working with and how hard it'd be to implement such a menu, but it would be a nice addition that looks easy enough to implement, since the system is already there, so give it some thought.
You should also give some thought to group toggles. Like, a superlabor column you can add to a group, which will update itself with all the labors on it's group. Not only that, but since it effectively represents it's group, you could have the group collapse into the group column and reduce the space it takes, opening up said group when you need to enable or disable a single labor in said group. I know you love anything that'll condense the info, so give this some thought too.
Now, here's something that really irks me about superlabors: You know how you can enable a labor for a group of dwarves all at once, right? Then why can't you do the same with superlabors? Like, hey, let's turn all these new migrants into rangers, in a single click! Only you can't.
I think they might be waiting until there are 64-bit memory maps available to make testing easier.
Well, if they ever get bored then they can get off their lazy asses, come fix some bugs and start improving Therapist's usability
TL;DR:-Bugs:
--New spacers in the grid layout editor change their default name upon restarting DT
--Spacers do not keep the grid layout editor specified color upon restarting DT
--Sometimes, editing a column in grid layout editor will edit another column in a different group instead
-Issues:
--Column selection GUI for the grid layout editor is inefficient and could be improved upon
--Column edition GUI for the grid layout editor is inefficient and could be improved upon
--Superlabor editing GUI is inefficient and could be improved upon
-Feature requests:
--Dynamic, collapsable superlabors dependent on their current group, aka "Group columns"
--The ability to assign a superlabor to multiple dwarves, much like you can already assign a labor to multiple dwarves
--The ability to drag and drop columns from one group to another in the grid layout editor
--The return of the old grid layout
-Lots and lots of anger fueled rambling, spawned from frustration at the aforementioned bugs and issues
-The assumption that whoever is currently working in DT hates spacers, which I like, and loves right-clicking, which I hate.
Author
Topic: Dwarf Therapist (Maintained Branch) v.37.0 | DF 42.06 (Read 1001491 times)