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[splinterz]

that looks really good.     (highlighting in the tooltips is even better than setting the preference weight to zero, imo.)

my in game observation (quite "unscientific", i know) leads me to believe that metal (material) preferences effect the quality of item production.  i could be wrong about this...  certainly item preferences have this effect.  (Edit; the wiki supports my observation! yay.)

Edit: for the leatherworker the suggestion is to add things back in.  currently the role has only items which are unique to the leatherworker, quivers, backpacks, etc.  i am responsible for this monstrosity.    looking at it yet again perhaps all clothing items should be included in the role?

oh that's right, i'd kind of disregarded that point on the wiki since there was no discussion and nothing cited for the quality tests. i'm sure i'd found a thread about that at some point though... i'll see if i can dig it up.

maybe i should see about adding a general clothing category for roles as well, that may be possible. i think it would be good to have the other types in the leatherworker role, but it's a bit unfortunate to have to add them all individually, since even a tiny mod to add another piece of clothing requires a new role.

Edit: well that was easy: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=96501.0

[Sye]

So.. Random bit I've noticed, and can't find explanation for in the thread -- What's up with the gender icons that aren't explicitly "Male" or "Female"?  Like.. A double-"female" icon, or a melding of "male" and "female" icons?  I've never noticed alternates to those, before.

[Hello71]

So.. Random bit I've noticed, and can't find explanation for in the thread -- What's up with the gender icons that aren't explicitly "Male" or "Female"?  Like.. A double-"female" icon, or a melding of "male" and "female" icons?  I've never noticed alternates to those, before.

orientation.

[Sye]

That's what I thought was the case -- But honestly, I didn't even know that was a flag already in the system.

Playin' the game for two years, now, and I still learn new things.

[Dirst]

That's what I thought was the case -- But honestly, I didn't even know that was a flag already in the system.

Playin' the game for two years, now, and I still learn new things.

It's fairly recent (with 0.40) and I think Dwarf Therapist only recently got those icons.  If you open up a Details screen on the Dwarf, then the icon has a tooltip.

[khearn]

I've discovered something that should be a negative preference. Weaponsmiths (and no doubt armorsmiths) should have negative weighting for most non-weapons grade metals. In particular, a weaponsmith who likes aluminum is a bad thing. He'll get a strange mood and insist on using your one bar of aluminum to make a weapon. Trust me, I found this out yesterday. Aluminum is a really bad metal for weapons or armor. Lead would be really bad for armor, but at least it has a chance of becoming a decent hammer. Things like zinc or tin would also be bad for a weapon/armor smith to have.

It shouldn't be a huge weighting, but it should be there.

   Keith

[feelotraveller]

oh that's right, i'd kind of disregarded that point on the wiki since there was no discussion and nothing cited for the quality tests. i'm sure i'd found a thread about that at some point though... i'll see if i can dig it up.

maybe i should see about adding a general clothing category for roles as well, that may be possible. i think it would be good to have the other types in the leatherworker role, but it's a bit unfortunate to have to add them all individually, since even a tiny mod to add another piece of clothing requires a new role.

Edit: well that was easy: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=96501.0

i've read that thread a couple of times.  for me the most important point is what comes out in the quote from Toady in the final post.  basically attributes matter a fair bit at lower skill levels but not that much at high skill levels.  blue_dwarf's otherwise excellent research misses most of this since it is all carried out with a legendary +5 dwarf.* 

observation leads me to believe that preferences have the same sort of relation to skill level as attributes in regard to quality.  in my experience a valid preference for an item or material type makes roughly a level of quality difference, on average, when a dwarf has 0-10 levels of skill.  the precise difference could be determined... but currently i am more inclined to play the game (or post here).

if preferences did not effect quality levels (and i assure you that there are many cases when they do even if the how much is not determined) then they would be far less important for the roles.  unfortunately for us only about half of the roles have quality outcomes.  so weaver, dyer and clothier preferences, effecting the quality of the item produced, are much more important to the role than the preferences of spinners, threshers and shearers.  my quick personal solution has been to try to cover this distinction with how i lay out my grid views. 

the deeper solution is probably to break the global preference weighting into two groups to reflect this.  first up though, i am waiting to get back on the same page as everyone else (so no version confusion arises) to do some empirical testing of how sets of preferences behave both internal to a role and across a group of roles.  (once i can see what happens in detail i can start making informed decisions about what/how many preferences to include in which roles.)  then to play with the weightings which were deliberately left all set to 1.00 since v25 (the last standard version of dwarf therapist i have access to...) did not cope well when other weightings were used.

* hence my uneasiness above with the engraver role. the contribution from creativity is more significant at low skill levels, but at that point the dwarf is likely to be smoothing an activity where creativity is not a relevant attribute...

I've discovered something that should be a negative preference. Weaponsmiths (and no doubt armorsmiths) should have negative weighting for most non-weapons grade metals. In particular, a weaponsmith who likes aluminum is a bad thing. He'll get a strange mood and insist on using your one bar of aluminum to make a weapon. Trust me, I found this out yesterday. Aluminum is a really bad metal for weapons or armor. Lead would be really bad for armor, but at least it has a chance of becoming a decent hammer. Things like zinc or tin would also be bad for a weapon/armor smith to have.

It shouldn't be a huge weighting, but it should be there.

   Keith

Keith you are probably right but that is so far along the curve i am not even thinking about it, since it would mean a weighting (not trivial to figure out just what either) for each metal.  Forbidding and burrows will offer a solution to this problem in certain cases, ... or dig out some candy and keep your aluminium!  If you do come up with your own customised role I'd be interested in seeing it. 

[khearn]

Burrows or candy wouldn't have solved it, methinks. I had steel, and forbade every bar except for steel, and he just sat in the forge, refusing to get the steel. Once I realized that he liked aluminum, I unforbade the aluminum bars and he immediately grabbed one. I doubt that burrows would have acted differently, nor would having candy available. If I didn't have any aluminum bars, I'm not sure if his aluminum preference would have mattered. If he still would have held out for aluminum, then aluminum is a very bad preference, since most forts never have it available at all, so a smith that insisted on it would go crazy a large percentage of the time, rather than just create a worthless artifact. But if he would have taken the steel if I didn't have any aluminum, then it's not all that bad.

But that's not really relevant. I agree that figuring out the weighting isn't the top priority at the moment. What I'm seeing is that a lot of the role valuation will be very dependent on the player and the situation. If you never use breastplates, then an armorer who likes breastplates doesn't matter, but if you use them then it does. I give all of my troops metal helms, even my archers who wear mostly leather. So a leathercrafter who likes helms isn't valuable to me. Others go with the default archer uniform and would benefit from a leatherworker who likes helms. Metalcrafters who like silver in a fort with no silver ores. Carpenters who like doors in a desert embark that doesn't have enough wood to be able to make wooden doors. Lots of situations where a normally good preference isn't worth anything.

I think the most important thing is to make it easy for people to customize the weightings for roles on the fly. Currently (I think) that means creating a new role, copied from a default role, and creating a new grid, copied from a default grid, and replacing the default role with the new one. I'm not sure if there's a better way to do it.

    Keith

[khearn]

New feature idea:

It would be nice to be able to save the current labor assignments and restore them at a later time.

Use case: A caravan arrives and I designate a bunch of items to be taken to the depot. All my dwarves are busy doing other stuff, so nothing is being moved. So I would like to save the current labor assignments, then turn off just about everything for everyone, leaving Trade Goods Hauling on. Everything gets moved to the depot, then I want to be able to restore the previous labor assignments.

There are other times when I would also like to make temporary changes to labor assignments and be able to get back to the original set of assignments easily, like when I really want a bunch of walls built quickly, so everyone becomes a mason for a few days, then I need to get back to just my normal set of masons.

This isn't a high priority, but it would be pretty nice at times.

   Keith

[splinterz]

i've read that thread a couple of times.  for me the most important point is what comes out in the quote from Toady in the final post.  basically attributes matter a fair bit at lower skill levels but not that much at high skill levels.  blue_dwarf's otherwise excellent research misses most of this since it is all carried out with a legendary +5 dwarf.* 

observation leads me to believe that preferences have the same sort of relation to skill level as attributes in regard to quality.  in my experience a valid preference for an item or material type makes roughly a level of quality difference, on average, when a dwarf has 0-10 levels of skill.  the precise difference could be determined... but currently i am more inclined to play the game (or post here).

if preferences did not effect quality levels (and i assure you that there are many cases when they do even if the how much is not determined) then they would be far less important for the roles.  unfortunately for us only about half of the roles have quality outcomes.  so weaver, dyer and clothier preferences, effecting the quality of the item produced, are much more important to the role than the preferences of spinners, threshers and shearers.  my quick personal solution has been to try to cover this distinction with how i lay out my grid views. 

the deeper solution is probably to break the global preference weighting into two groups to reflect this.  first up though, i am waiting to get back on the same page as everyone else (so no version confusion arises) to do some empirical testing of how sets of preferences behave both internal to a role and across a group of roles.  (once i can see what happens in detail i can start making informed decisions about what/how many preferences to include in which roles.)  then to play with the weightings which were deliberately left all set to 1.00 since v25 (the last standard version of dwarf therapist i have access to...) did not cope well when other weightings were used.

* hence my uneasiness above with the engraver role. the contribution from creativity is more significant at low skill levels, but at that point the dwarf is likely to be smoothing an activity where creativity is not a relevant attribute...

i see what you mean about splitting the global preference weight into two, that might work. but i agree, more testing is required, and i also try to get in some game time instead of just working on DT

the roles are still looking a lot better, and i've poked around with the armor types to see about splitting them into actual armor vs clothing, and it may be possible.

I think the most important thing is to make it easy for people to customize the weightings for roles on the fly. Currently (I think) that means creating a new role, copied from a default role, and creating a new grid, copied from a default grid, and replacing the default role with the new one. I'm not sure if there's a better way to do it.

well, it could be something like adding roles to groups of roles. so you could have multiple roles for your weaponsmith, and then swap out the column (right click, choose role from the 'weaponsmith' group) for whatever fits your current fort.

it would be more manageable than having to essentially create a new view for each fort, and should be possible to setup the role columns to allow on the fly role swapping.

New feature idea:

It would be nice to be able to save the current labor assignments and restore them at a later time.

someone recently had the same idea. although currently there isn't any data stored with the individual saves, so the first step may be just to have a history of commits or something, allow you to 'undo' a recent commit. i'm not sure.

[thistleknot]

that snapshot makes a lot of sense.

The way I do roles is in 3 or 4 different phases.

If I could snapshot it, get everyone to the trade depot stat, and then restore the snapshot, I wouldn't have to do 3 to 4 stages for interruptions like that.

However, generally, I just try to balance my number of haulers with the superlabors... but that isn't always the best solution.  The best would be to disable all labors, everyone hauling, then when trading is over, restore.

[khearn]

New feature idea:

It would be nice to be able to save the current labor assignments and restore them at a later time.

someone recently had the same idea. although currently there isn't any data stored with the individual saves, so the first step may be just to have a history of commits or something, allow you to 'undo' a recent commit. i'm not sure.

I'd even be happy if the snapshot didn't survive a game save/restore, but was only kept in memory. Most of the time I envision using it for a short period of time. Of course, you'd need to have a pretty clear warning so that someone didn't assume it would still be remembered after a save/restore.

But being able to undo a commit would also be a nice feature to have, and would probably be good enough for my use case. Being able to undo multiple commits would be even nicer, since I often make a bunch of changes, do a commit, then notice one or two more that I missed, and do them. Then I'd want to be able to get back to they way they were before the first commit. But even with just a single undoable commit, if I notice that I missed something, I could undo, redo with the thing I missed, then commit. More hassle, but much better than nothing.

   Keith

[ResMar]

To be honest, I'd rather see Splint finish polishing what's there, such as in this lengthy discussion on how roles are calculated, before incrementing the feature creep.

[feelotraveller]

And of course the next post will suggest more feature creep. 

If a role is set up with non-standard aspect weighting and the global aspect weightings are subsequently changed then the use of of the 'restore defaults' button will not restore the weights of the custom role instead setting it to the default global aspect weights.  The simple workaround is to quit dwarf therapist and relaunch. 

Edit: I really like the above 'snapshot' suggestion. (Not sure if it might be better to allow the user to save a state of labours rather than trying to track an entire history of commits?) As much as I've been banging on about roles they are just icing on the cake.  The essential feature of dwarf therapist (for me) is its labour management function.  Something it already does really well.  The ability to restore a set of labour assignments would be a very useful extension of functionality.

[thistleknot]

how do I get those wonderful preference matches to show up... I thought I built the latest build...

derp... brb

tight

I remember a time when I didn't even know what Preferences were when someone brought them up and asking about inclusion into DT.  Nice to see full circle.