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[AfellowDwarf]

There's always more features to add. Yes, if Toady spent more time developing the UI, he would also spend more time gutting the UI, but he does that with other features all the time.

UI improvements might take substantially more time to change then most features. Or perhaps they take a lot less time to test, making them more viable to implement towards the end. Either way, there are indeed more features to add, and if Toady wants to get enough in to move this game out of alpha within our lifetimes, he had better go about it as efficiently as posible, even if it's a little unpleasant for us.

[JasonMel]

I propose pausing development sometime around the 0.50 release to code up a pleasant, tight UI and/or docs and then leaving it to go back to developing the internals with the old UI intact. It would essentially be a dead-end fork of the code whose only purpose is to give the world a version of DF with a nice interface. This would solve the problem of having to strip anything out later. The same thing could be done for every release that is a multiple of 0.5.

If you haven't seen it, check out Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for what a roguelike interface could be like. Its UI and documentation are just dreamy.

[Bumber]

I propose pausing development sometime around the 0.50 release to code up a pleasant, tight UI and/or docs and then leaving it to go back to developing the internals with the old UI intact. It would essentially be a dead-end fork of the code whose only purpose is to waste time Toady could otherwise spend implementing core features.

FTFY.

The game is still in Alpha. (Most games aren't even supposed to be played in Alpha.) Don't expect any kind of pretty UI until Beta. The more time spent actually getting us there, the better.

[JasonMel]

All right, point taken, but I ask that you please don't do that to my quotes in the future. Quoting should be for quotations only.

[clockwork]

I think there was a user on the forum a year or so ago who was developing a mouse oriented UI modification. I don't remember what thread it was...or their username....and I'm to lazy to make use of the search engine on this website....but, if I remember correctly, they were making buttons out of various command and organizing the menu differently. I thought it was kinda neat, I'd never really seen someone try a UI mod on DF, but I think they got tired of keeping up with toady's updates, because they kind of stopped working on it after Pottery was added...

[King Mir]

There's always more features to add. Yes, if Toady spent more time developing the UI, he would also spend more time gutting the UI, but he does that with other features all the time.

UI improvements might take substantially more time to change then most features. Or perhaps they take a lot less time to test, making them more viable to implement towards the end. Either way, there are indeed more features to add, and if Toady wants to get enough in to move this game out of alpha within our lifetimes, he had better go about it as efficiently as posible, even if it's a little unpleasant for us.

I disagree.

There's no reason for UI changes to take substantially more time. Even if it did, it's worth it, because it matters more.

The game isn't in alpha. It is not a pre-release designed to catch bugs. The game is intended to be playable and fun in it's current state. The UI seriously compromises that objective. As this thread proves, more people would play dwarf fortress if they weren't scared off by the UI. More players mean more donors.

But to the extent that the game does work like alpha, as testing ground, UI is precisely the kind of thing that should be tested by users extensively, and iteratively improved. Which is all the more reason to improve the UI now. That way it can be made even better based on user feedback.

Toady intentionally uses an iterative development process. This is good. He adds a bunch of features, then fixes the bugs the community finds, before moving onto another feature cycles. However, in my opinion he underutilized the process to fix non-bug problems, like UI clunkiness and balance issues.

[NTJedi]

If the game had a better UI and better graphics the community would grow massively.  The larger the community the more donors.

Now I'm not saying the game needs awesome fancy stuff, but even something equal to the quality of the late 90s would work.

[Bumber]

The game isn't in alpha.

Don't know about you, but my game specifically tells me the game is in alpha when I go to gen a world.

[King Mir]

If the game had a better UI and better graphics the community would grow massively.  The larger the community the more donors.

Now I'm not saying the game needs awesome fancy stuff, but even something equal to the quality of the late 90s would work.

It's not even the graphics. Streamlining the interface would do a lot. Like put constructions and digging designations in the same menu. Provide better and consistent ways to search long lists. Provide the same menu when the same list is displayed in different contexts.

There's a lot that could be done.

The game isn't in alpha.

Don't know about you, but my game specifically tells me the game is in alpha when I go to gen a world.

The game is meant to be playable and a money maker in it's present state.

[Bumber]

The game is meant to be playable and a money maker in it's present state.

I see it more like we're funding development. Being able to play it early is a bonus afforded by the indie development method and long projected development time.

[sweitx]

In the mean time, try DFHack.
It helps a lot. The Dwarf Manipulator, Workflow, and Search functions are a god-sent.

[King Mir]

The game is meant to be playable and a money maker in it's present state.

I see it more like we're funding development. Being able to play it early is a bonus afforded by the indie development method and long projected development time.

I agree that we're funding development, but I see each release as an expansion of an existing, working game, and version 1.0 as a limit on future expansion plans.

[Footkerchief]

The game is meant to be playable and a money maker in it's present state.

I see it more like we're funding development. Being able to play it early is a bonus afforded by the indie development method and long projected development time.

I agree that we're funding development, but I see each release as an expansion of an existing, working game, and version 1.0 as a limit on future expansion plans.

Why do you think that?  Toady has always said that 1.0 is the baseline for the game being "done," and that he plans to keep expanding it afterward.

[King Mir]

Because, the game is meant to be playable and played now, and not in 20 years.

I don't mean that the game will stop development at version 1.0. What I'm saying is that calling the game "alpha" does not excuse the bad UI.

[Cobbler89]

Like put constructions and digging designations in the same menu.

As it is one of the things new players have to grasp is the difference between designations, constructions and buildings, especially given some of the overlap (carve out a stair vs. construct a stair in carved-out space); I don't think putting the potentially confusable subjects into the same menu would help that situation.

That's not to say the UI couldn't be made more intuitive, but just to say that it is organized, just more by the game's distinctions that you have to learn than by the natural sense of "hey, where's the menu for building a house? What do you mean that each step has a different menu?"

If the game had a better UI and better graphics the community would grow massively.  The larger the community the more donors.

It's not a something vs. nothing tradeoff, it's a something vs. something tradeoff: it's not "game as it is now vs. game as it is now plus UI/graphics", it's "game as it will be in so many years vs. game as it is now plus UI/graphics". Imagine, for instance, if Toady had started work on graphics about a year ago -- there would be no minecarts. Consequently, you can't just say as a granted that better UI/graphics would increase the community, because the question is whether it would increase more with better UI/graphics or with more features (and bugfixes). You could, of course, weigh those things and come down with an opinion on the same side anyway, but it would be much more reasonable than just saying "graphics is better than no graphics" without considering what "no graphics" is developing.

Relatedly, people I know don't like having to relearn menus much more than they like having more complete ones, and it's probably been mentioned by now that Toady expects elements of the interface to change because of the expanding and refining of the features they control.