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[Oort]

I just don't agree with this approach. It seems kind of arrogant to think that we as players have a better idea of how to develop the game than Toady does, and amassing a pool of money that mandates a certain condition rather than donating it directly to him is just rude.

 I think it's okay to feel that the game could use an upgrade to "playability" (even if I disagree), and I'd be totally cool with this thread if all you were doing was expressing an opinion. But you're not just expressing an opinion, you're effectively threatening to withhold donation money if you don't get your way.

[wierd]

Uhm? I'm not the OP?

The thread is 7 pages long-- it's been kinda threadjacked away from such unsavory suggestions, and now is basically just discussing the issue surrounding the continual complaints about the UI, and opinions on that matter.

I just threw in my 1.50$.

as far as I can tell, the basic arguments are "It's just as rude of us to say the guy's an asshole and flame him into submission", coupled with "Really, the UI really DOES have usability issues, but it works well enough that we can ignore them" and I just put out that many of the complaints could be solved with some simple and easily maintained changes to the presentation system, and pass the buck on who needs to implement "the perfect UI". 

I am actually very much against trying to coerce the creators of just a lovely project in such a way. They make DF for their OWN pleasure, not ours, and we have no right to tell them their business.  Really, putnam and I were just engaging in impotent rambling on things we would like to see.

[WoobMonkey]

I'm going to poke my head back into this thread, now that rational voices are present (thank you, wierd and Putnam!)

What, IMHO, we all need to remember is that DF is a work of art, recognized by no less an august institution as the Smithsonian.

When people make posts that read like demands, I can't help but think to myself: 'What would be the result of someone coming into Picasso's house (this forum is, after all, as much Toady and ThreeToes' as the game itself), and started demanding that he make his work more accessible, by not being so goddamned Cubist about it?!?!?!?!'

Expressing an opinion is one thing; suggesting that an organized campaign of bribery is the way to have one's own vision supersede the actual artist's is another.  One that's quite insulting, I daresay.

'Gee, Mr. Monet, your canvases are nice enough in their own way, but I wanna be able to see the whole picture from six inches away, on a 1' x 1' canvas.  How much money would I need to offer for you to sell short your artistic vision?'

[Oort]

I mistook your position as being in support of the kickstarter, my bad. I may have skimmed a little too much 

That being said, I'm not sure I think that graphical development should be a priority. I'd much rather have more of Toady's time devoted to developing gameplay features, because to me the visuals are only relevant as far as they are functional.

[WanderingKid]

That being said, I'm not sure I think that graphical development should be a priority. I'd much rather have more of Toady's time devoted to developing gameplay features, because to me the visuals are only relevant as far as they are functional.

I'm afraid I have to disagree there.  While I realize there are a number of players who prefer ASCII art, I for one do not.  I also find trying to figure out which workshop is which is more a case of me knowing where I put what than being able to recognize what it is on screen.  Weird's recommendation, which I personally hope he'll organize into a formal suggestion and put it on the suggestion forum for Toady to consider eventually, is one I would find highly helpful.

[Oort]

I can definitely see Weird's plan being a pretty smart solution for those of you who do enjoy tilesets. Just not my cup of tea.
Hell, I don't even play with truetype enabled

[Putnam]

Neither do I. I don't even play with Therapist, most of the time.

But I do think that full graphics support is extremely important. It turns tilesets from these ugly things that ruin letters and punctuation into something actually usable.

[wierd]

Even for ascii-mode puritans, it would provide useful features, in that a "tileset" of basically just an extended bitmapped font would be possible then, giving more than the 255 ascii glyphs. That would give access to things like the euro symbol, extended greek, et al.

Some of those extended characters would make better replacements for things like levers, bags, and stacks of meat.

It is functionality that is clearly lacking.

[Putnam]

Toady's talked about moving into extended character sets if sticking with CP437 ever becomes a problem:

Rainseeker:   Let's talk about ASCII characters!

Toady:   Alright.

Rainseeker:    Because your game is ASCII, and ASCII is probably the most fun graphical representation of a game I've ever played. It's definitely old school ... but I think that the complexity of your game totally overwhelms even noticing it's ASCII after a while. Macbeth asked this interesting question; 'As the project gets more complex do you expect that these ASCII character sets won't be able to support the detail you're adding? What are your plans for displaying that information?'

Toady:   It's already at that point, if you've seen the elves versus elephants or goblins versus goats or whatever issues come up ...

Rainseeker:   'Why are those elephants shooting arrows at me? I don't understand!'

Toady:   And there are methods of getting around that to some extent, but eventually you hit a wall. You saw with world generation recently the human sprawl I went with lines and whatever the letter is called (�) when you put an 'a' and an 'e' together for the hill farms, and eventually your bag runs out of ... bag stuff ...

Rainseeker:   Tricks.

Toady:   There's no more tricks in the bags, no more little characters in the bag. And so then you hit that point where you're like 'do you just go over to a tileset at that point? Do you experiment with Unicode stuff? If you add just a new IBM codepage r256 grid characters or whatever ...' If we add another grid of characters that look promising and just stick with that, that's kind of counterproductive in a way, because once you jump up beyond 256 you're free to move about the country at that point and go up to 65'000 or millions or whatever the rewrite entails.
At the same time there's something to be said for the ASCII mode of the game, which I like because I can develop it quickly and I don't have to ... Zach and I drawing is not the same as other people drawing ... or maybe the problem is it's the same as other people drawing who aren't artists. And we can't use other people's tilesets without worrying about legal business, and more so not just legal business but ongoing development; if we've got a tileset then are there release delays when we wait for new pictures, or if a person drawing a tileset bails do we try and find somebody that can draw in the same style as they do, or does it become some kind of hellish hybrid of different art styles.
It's difficult when we don't have an employee that we can employ for several years, or a person who will stick with the project. People stick with the project, like Baughn's been helping us for quite a long time, but what happens? If Baughn leaves, I do have some trouble with linux and mac support and so on, and other people can help with that, and I'm not sure graphics is the same way where someone can just step in and do the exact same thing, although artists are talented and there's probably someone who can do that, but I don't know if I can count on that or not.
Then there's the legal question, I don't know how to do that properly; I have to make sure I can find someone I can trust who isn't going to lift a glyph from Nintendo without me noticing. So there're a lot of questions, it's not completely ruled out, but there're a lot of questions. The other method would be just to add another 256 characters if I don't just go with some Unicode font or something. And in a sense there's a charm at least with the vanilla, of adding just another 256 characters, because it's an extension that's required, but it still sticks within the same kind of poetic form. But there's going to be like seven people that agree with that assessment and a whole crapload of people that are like 'what the hell are you thinking?' So we're kind of there in a sense ... not super pressing at least, not anymore pressing than adding graphics to the game always was with running out of characters to display the information. But it's certainly already hit that wall in several places, and it's only filling it out more as time goes on.

[Finn]

That being said, I'm not sure I think that graphical development should be a priority. I'd much rather have more of Toady's time devoted to developing gameplay features, because to me the visuals are only relevant as far as they are functional.

I'm afraid I have to disagree there.  While I realize there are a number of players who prefer ASCII art, I for one do not.  I also find trying to figure out which workshop is which is more a case of me knowing where I put what than being able to recognize what it is on screen.  Weird's recommendation, which I personally hope he'll organize into a formal suggestion and put it on the suggestion forum for Toady to consider eventually, is one I would find highly helpful.

Well, if you feel that "Weird's recommendation" can be summed up by the phrase "abstract the interface", then you are in luck because it's already there!  http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php  As is almost every other one of the common suggestions that are continuously rehashed in threads like these. 

Q: Have you ever considered making the UI external to the game, so that somebody else could take care of it while you'd be able to fully concentrate on the simulation aspect itself? By external I mean - export appropriate API to control the game, and import a few symbols from the UI SO/DLL so that the game would be able to interact with it. Considering the fact that the game already reacts to the user input (hence you have those entry points that need to be exported already well defined) creating such interface should be only a matter of finding the time to do it.

The community has already proven that they have the ability to deliver superior UI (Stonesense, Dwarf Therapist, numerous tilesets, etc.), so why won't you leave it to them? There are limits to what one can do with memory hacking; a real API would make it possible to make something like Stonesense, but fully interactive. Wouldn't that be awesome?

A: I've thought about it. It seems like it would take a lot of work to maintain...There are lots and lots and lots of data structures, and the API would not be a simple thing, and it wouldn't be something I could just do once and then forget about.

[wierd]

There's a subtle but important difference there from what I had in mind.

As suggested in the quote, that's more like running DF in a "headless" configuration, and then connecting to it with a client process.

As toady points out, there are a lot of memory structures that need to be conserved.

What I propose is more "seperate worker thread in same process".  Both theads would have the same memory context, but could work independently on different processors.  Rather than be an api that is exported for an external renderer, it would be a generic internal renderer that has a configurable behavior. If the memory hacking crowd wanted to, they could write a binary patch that hooks that seperate process and hang a visualizers on top of it much like stonesense does. There's no real reason for toady to maintain such interfaces. I'm not asking him to.

This is more a suggested to reorganize the internal structures a little so that ascii is less riggorously enforced, and maintaining tilesets is less "hairy".

[MrWiggles]

There's a subtle but important difference there from what I had in mind.

As suggested in the quote, that's more like running DF in a "headless" configuration, and then connecting to it with a client process.

As toady points out, there are a lot of memory structures that need to be conserved.

What I propose is more "seperate worker thread in same process".  Both theads would have the same memory context, but could work independently on different processors.  Rather than be an api that is exported for an external renderer, it would be a generic internal renderer that has a configurable behavior. If the memory hacking crowd wanted to, they could write a binary patch that hooks that seperate process and hang a visualizers on top of it much like stonesense does. There's no real reason for toady to maintain such interfaces. I'm not asking him to.

This is more a suggested to reorganize the internal structures a little so that ascii is less riggorously enforced, and maintaining tilesets is less "hairy".

Toadyone isnt into multi threading the game either.

[Putnam]

Graphics are already out in a different thread, actually.

[MrWiggles]

Graphics are already out in a different thread, actually.

And thats probably going to be the only thing that gets a thread onto itself.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Toadyone isnt into multi threading the game either.

If I recall correctly it isn't that he's against multithreading as such, it's that he doesn't know enough about multithread coding to do it without it resulting in massive work on his part better spent other stuff. (?)

And the graphics stuff was done by Baughn :>


Edit: Not that your phrasing necessarily is incompatible with the real picture, but other people could get the idea Toady just didn't like multithreading for no reason