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[ResMar]

Seeing the discussions about the grid views, IMO the default should be the same as it has in the past and as has been covered in many LTP videos.  The fact that it is only two clicks to change the view can also be applied as "Yes, it only takes two clicks for someone to pull up a new and improved view."

They said the same thing about horseless carriages. I see some reasonable reasons to preserve the old view as a default, though I disagree with them. This is not one of them.

But ultimately the decision is Splint's. In development terms, I just write the guide.

[Billy Jack]

only one shows up when right-clicking and assigning a role

this almost sounds like you're talking about custom professions, can you explain how and what you're assigning a role to?

You are correct, my bad.  I'm not defining any custom roles so that would explain why the items aren't expanding out for me.

It's all starting to come back to me, now (been about 6 mo. since last played).  So I have to open the Customizations window and then I can right-click the custom professions to edit / delete.  Enhancement request would be to make that available from the same right-clicking on dwarf to create the custom profession from that dwarf's labors.

Thanks for your time.

@ResMar
Comparing it to the horse drawn carriages vs. the automobile argument wouldn't really be an appropriate comparison. I think a better comparison would be the UI for Windows 8 vs. Windows 7. 
And I agree, it is Splint's decision.

Great guide btw.

[splinterz]

Question/Feature Request:

Is it possible to tweak the Animals panel (either something that's already there that I'm overlooking, or something for a future release) to show the description of individual animals? You know, the stuff you get on their status screens: "gigantic", "enormous yet skinny" etc? It'd make it easier to decide who / how many to butcher.

(If this is something already brought up & discussed, sorry for missing it!)

i think what might work for you is sorting by the body size. right click on the column header above the name, and you'll have special sort options, including body size.

[splinterz]

only one shows up when right-clicking and assigning a role

this almost sounds like you're talking about custom professions, can you explain how and what you're assigning a role to?

You are correct, my bad.  I'm not defining any custom roles so that would explain why the items aren't expanding out for me.

It's all starting to come back to me, now (been about 6 mo. since last played).  So I have to open the Customizations window and then I can right-click the custom professions to edit / delete.  Enhancement request would be to make that available from the same right-clicking on dwarf to create the custom profession from that dwarf's labors.

yeah there's a lot of management that's directly through the docks at the moment. ResMar has also requested that the menus be retooled to have everything up in the top menu bar, so you could add/edit/remove custom professions like how you can access custom roles.

[AriRashkae]

Question/Feature Request:

Is it possible to tweak the Animals panel (either something that's already there that I'm overlooking, or something for a future release) to show the description of individual animals? You know, the stuff you get on their status screens: "gigantic", "enormous yet skinny" etc? It'd make it easier to decide who / how many to butcher.

(If this is something already brought up & discussed, sorry for missing it!)

i think what might work for you is sorting by the body size. right click on the column header above the name, and you'll have special sort options, including body size.

Cool. Thanks!

EDIT: Oddly enough, the text description in-game & the body size read by DT do not always match up. My largest ram by cm(3) is the "skinny" one, and the "muscular & enormous" one is the smallest! I'll have to track them for a few generations & see how it plays out.

[Meph]

Just because its skinny doesnt mean it cant be large. Bodysize is volume, not weight.

[AriRashkae]

Very true! Of course, I'm burdened with an overabundance of food right now, so it's more an academic thing. I'm more interested in the wool. 

[crossmr]

Whether you are doing it for free or not, you still have a typical business/customer relationship with the users. If you're taking the time to do this and share it, it's because you want people to actually use it which means you actually have to listen to feedback and take people's needs into consideration. In business you never blame the customer, and in software you never blame the user. If users are struggling to find information and understand features that isn't their fault as a group. While you might actually get some utterly clueless users at times, for the most part you users are average people and those are the people who still have an issue with the way things are right now.

I dont agree with that part all that much. I always go more for the Pareto Principle, which is the 20/80 rule. 20% of your users give you 80% of your feedback.

But as someone in a similar position as Splinterz: It can be hard sometimes when you get a bunch of negative comments or demands or misunderstandings thrown around, while you work hard and sacrifice your free time for something that only other people use. It can be taxing, but is usually resolved by just taking a day off. At least in my case.

I don't see how what we both said is mutually exclusive. I didn't really say anything about how many users would be coming here to give feedback, only that on average, they would be average. Active doesn't mean they're not an average user of average ability.

not to say that this gridview fiasco is exactly one of those moments, just that unyielding mentally that 'the customer is always right' rubs me the wrong way (which is probably why i'm encouraged to avoid all contact with clients normally )

There is a reason it's basically the number one rule in business. Because any company that doesn't follow that is pretty much setting themselves up for failure. It doesn't actually mean the customer is always right though. What it really means is that the customer should be made to feel like they're always right. We only need to look around the internet for tons of examples where creators ignored the users and it ended up essentially killing their project. 

You have a long established default, anything with less than 100% of the relevant information probably shouldn't be a default, any kind of compact or advanced view should be for those kinds of users who want it. Essentially you have the "alt" part backwards. Those kinds of things can be enabled by or created by those more advanced users who want to have that kind of view. Any newbie and anyone who only wants basic labour management doesn't need that other kind of view.

You'll probably find that's a good portion of your userbase.

[khearn]

That URL is correct. Glad you like it, and that I (and/but moreso Splint) now understands where the issue is. Catching up the documentation to the program took me a lot of time because, like you, I've been waiting for DF2014 to drop. I give a fluid explanation of how optimization plans work, if you liked the rest of the explanations you'll like that one too: though the only usecase I have in the guide right now is the holistic "Putting it all Together" example of military drafting.

Well, I read the optimizer section today. I wasn't in front of DT to try stuff, but I think I got the gist of it. Some things aren't completely clear. It seems like it would be very hard to describe so someone can understand it just from reading. I think some hands-on experience is going to be needed.

But I'm pretty sure it doesn't really do what I want. It seems to allow setting a limit of X labors per dwarf, and all of the dwarves could get that many. But I don't want my miners stopping work to shear a sheep. I want to be able to say "If they get mining, they get no others. But these other skills are OK for one dwarf to have a few. Oh, but if he's my mason, he'll be busy, so don't give him carpentry, because that's a busy skill, too." I think I want to be able to specify how "busy" a labor is, and have the optimizer not give any one dwarf too much busy-ness.

Maybe what I need is a way to specify for each labor a value from 0 to 1.0, and no dwarf should ever have labors totalling above 1.0. Then I can say that mining is 1.0, masonry and carpentry are 0.6, cooking and brewing are 0.5, tanning, butchery and fish cleaning are 0.2, etc. Then a dwarf could get (masonry, butchery and tanning), but not (masonry and cooking).

Or am I missing a way to do this sort of thing?

   Keith

[ResMar]

If you do some math I'm sure you can find the right ratios to get what you're looking for. Personally though I only ever use the optimizer to dedicate dwarves. I'd rather have a weaver who isn't employed that often, but jumps to it when it's time, then go through the efforts of intricately organizing labor sets that are easy to forget and hard to optimize (heh, get it?).

The usecases I'm looking at for optimization plans are standard industry-starter ones. Things like setting up a clothing industry or a metalsmith shop with a preset number of laboring dwarves. This'll be easier to do once numerical optimization is explicitly implemented, which'll take out the extra step of figuring out and implementing what percentage of the dwarves you have selected you want to get optimized.

Splint if you ever get burned out know this, once the current tasks are done you'll be feature complete and can go on vacation. The way forward at that point would require outsourcing Dwarf Therapist memory access to DFHack, which would be quite the task.

[thistleknot]

So the super labors are kind of cool.  I like the click-ability of it in a grid view vs doing it via custom professions that I always have to reset afterwards.  However, what I'd like to do I can't, which I could before.

Before, I

would highlight/select a group of dwarfs. 

Right click,

   assign a custom profession,

reset the custom profession on the same group. 

It was 3 steps and it was annoying, but it was workable.

Now, instead, I

   highlight the group of dwarf's I want to assign to a super labor, and I

   click on the super labor gridview square, but it

   assign's all but the top selected dwarf.

[ResMar]

Whoa, you can assign custom professions in batches?

IIRC, the group labors toggle swaps all labors: enabled ones are disabled and disabled ones are enabled. I don't remember seeing any special behavior on the first-selected dwarf: are you sure that dwarf's labor isn't on?

[thistleknot]

the group labors toggle swaps all labors

?

I grouped by "caste" in vanilla

and I couldn't set all dwarf's to a superlabor via the gridview row that specifies the groupby method

[Zarathustra30]

How do I disable giving food/water?

[splinterz]

vjek pointed out that some functionality has been lost with the custom professions. previously you could 'reset to default' and it would remove the name only. in the last version it also toggles the associated labors.

you can work around this (for now) by changing the dwarf's custom profession to a blank name. this isn't ideal, but really if you only want labors, you should be using the superlabors.

from what i can understand, it's maybe the aggregate row cells that aren't toggling the entire group's superlabors? i'll test it out.

How do I disable giving food/water?

you'll need to use the alt labor view, or create/copy a view to access all the labors until i get another release out with the updated 'compact' and 'full' gridviews. Edit: or you can just import the views linked up in the thread.