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[TheDorf]

This sounds like a great idea. It would be nice if we were able to expand the playerbase. The type of users that require point-n-click controls probably aren't the type who create mods and plugins, but the game really deserves a bigger playerbase.

PTW. It would be awesome if someone who knows what they're doing began work on this.

[kittyfluffins]

Regarding placing bedrooms, I have an idea of how this may work. When you press the "Designate bedroom" button on our fancy UI that someone will create, the script will go to the stockpiles screen with a custom setting where everything is disabled. You'll designate the area you want to be the bedroom with the stockpile. Hopefully we can index/name this stockpile somehow. Then the script would build a bed, or "future build" a bed (the Building Plan Plugin make me think this is possible) in the middle of the stockpile and then remove the stockpile. Once the bed is placed, it will designate the bedroom and assign it to whoever we specified in our fancy UI.

There are some obvious problems with this, but it's just based on my limited knowledge of modding and what we have to work with. Can we get the size and/or locations of stockpiles? Do we have a way to delete them? Do we have another tool for designating square areas/rectangles that would work better for this, like burrows, or does DFHack have a way to designate areas?

I also want to know more about what our options are for an overlay. Could we do something like Jiri's suggestion in the old thread, where there are actual buttons and such on the screen? I have some experience programming, but nothing with DF or a GUI overlay. I should look to see what stonesense has.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Meph]

Morte Jiri Petru, PTW.

[Jiri Petru]

Regarding placing bedrooms, I have an idea of how this may work. When you press the "Designate bedroom" button on our fancy UI that someone will create, the script will go to the stockpiles screen with a custom setting where everything is disabled. You'll designate the area you want to be the bedroom with the stockpile. Hopefully we can index/name this stockpile somehow. Then the script would build a bed, or "future build" a bed (the Building Plan Plugin make me think this is possible) in the middle of the stockpile and then remove the stockpile. Once the bed is placed, it will designate the bedroom and assign it to whoever we specified in our fancy UI.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It can even be simpler - it doesn't need to place the bed automatically, which is I presume difficult to do, plus players might want to specify furniture themselves in order to create nice rooms or use specific colours etc. So scratch automatic furniture ordering.

What if the "Build > Bedroom" commands creates a burrow, and then regularly monitors whether a bed is placed in the burrow. I place the bed manually, upon which DFHack recognizes it, deletes the burrow and turns on the Bedroom option on the bed.

[PeridexisErrant]

"mousequery edge enable" does high-quality scrolling; I got Falconne to add it specifically to replace Mouse Fortress. You can also right-click near the edge to scroll without pausing, which I suspect clashes with MF. The edge scrolling sensitivity is adjustable.

For the bedrooms thing, I think the simplest way would be to add an extra step to the building planner plugin. It already does most of this, including filters for acceptable material and quality. IIRC a recent update also added the ability to assign rooms to a position instead of a dwarf, so automatically creating a bedroom off a placed bed shouldn't be too tricky. Other rooms might need special rules (eg create study from chair if not adjacent to table) and some calibration regarding room size and doors, but I think the ease of use would outweigh that for many players.

And another idea: autolabor is already great for a simple "I don't want to deal with this" abstraction of labor management.  Workflow, while excellent for most, still requires a fair bit of setup for new players. How about an upgrade that creates jobs to maintain basic supplies? It could pull from population, stocks, and other stats to determine what was needed. Then add the job through a manager hack!

[Robsoie]

Interesting,

I'm all for more mouse support in DF, i have been used the mousequery plugin for dfhack a lot in my last months of playing 34.11 , it was really great and very well thought.

Something i really liked regarding DF-like mouse driven interface was Goblin Camp that had a really great one, and if this proof of concept seems to follow the same path from what i see in the screenshot, it could end very very well

[thistleknot]

omg, [when implemented, would be awesome if] you can rotate buildings via that ui!

[Rose]

The UI wouldn't be able to let you do anything that DF doesn't, so rotated jewelers' workshops won't happen, sorry.

[fricy]

The UI wouldn't be able to let you do anything that DF doesn't, so rotated jewelers' workshops won't happen, sorry.

Custom workshops on the other hand...

[kittyfluffins]

It can even be simpler - it doesn't need to place the bed automatically, which is I presume difficult to do, plus players might want to specify furniture themselves in order to create nice rooms or use specific colours etc. So scratch automatic furniture ordering.

What if the "Build > Bedroom" commands creates a burrow, and then regularly monitors whether a bed is placed in the burrow. I place the bed manually, upon which DFHack recognizes it, deletes the burrow and turns on the Bedroom option on the bed.

What if you don't build the bed in the middle? I wonder if DFHack has the ability to make bedrooms that aren't squares centered at the bed.

When you designate the room, you could specify which bed to use. You could select from beds you already have, or materials that you don't have yet. You could filter by a color to use, like in the Uniform screens. You could specify other things you want to put in the room too: tables, chairs, cabinets, chests, etc. I even envisioned having templates you could configure outside of DF and choose from for different rooms. An office template, bedrooms with statues for nobles, basic bedrooms for migrants, burial rooms that are already decorated for the catacombs, etc.

I suppose if you combine that with macros for digging, then you could have your entire bedroom floor or catacombs designated and done with in a keystroke. That could stifle creativity a bit, so I may be going too far with this.

[Mathig]

Regarding placing rooms, there is a point where removing complexity actually removes control over the game. If you want to build your fortress in one key press... you are going to have no choice as toward what your fortress will look like, and that isn't any fun. The problem with auto-building rooms is that sizing the room is very important to be in the players hands. It is possible to have rooms with no walls that don't overlap, and overlap decreases the value of the rooms. Even creating a burrow then replacing it with the room is incredibly misleading. It tells the player "You've just built a bedroom" that they will then THINK does something, but in reality it does nothing, or worse. Burrows mess up workshop and stockpile use. Therefore, making a bedroom into a burrow changes how the stone in that burrow is used. Recording the building to be built then building it later shares the problem of having done nothing until a bedroom is placed.

[Draugo]

Mathing. I think that's pretty much a moot point if the user is aware of what they are doing. What I'd like to see is to have a single "create room" option and assign it to certain dwarfs. They can't obviously do anything in it before you give it some furniture but when they are placed I'd like to have it automatically determine the usage. Placing a bed would let the dwarf sleep in it, placing a table would enable eating etc. It's really not different from for example playing Sim City. You know the zones do nothing until someone actually builds something on the zones, only then you get function. It would be helpful if you could just "designate" a room by selecting corners and then removing extra spaces if necessary, or even use the autofill option you have now but from any point you like, not just from furniture.

[Treefingers]

The most important part of this project would be making a saner alternative to the menus and settings panels in DF.

Mouse control isn't obviously better for DF. Or it at least doesn't address a pressing UI concern since no one really has trouble moving the cursor around.

What will improve the game a lot for everyone is cleaner, better-organized menus.

Reducing steps in more complex operations will also be nice. It's a massive pain to customize stockpiles. And I only use custom stockpiles, except maybe for wood. Stock categories or presets that are redesigned along the lines of established DF techniques would be a godsend. e.g. Presets for inputs and outputs for each workshop, and easier selection for materials and qualities.

But I wouldn't want to see automatic construction like down stairs to match up stairs, since I can see that being incredibly fun in a number of situations.

---

On the room placement front, I don't think anyone should mess with core gameplay. A huge part of the magic of DF comes from the creativity made possible by the openness of the construction process. Being able to overlap room designations or have a room designation only cover part of the actual space have opened up a lot of fort design possibilities. Altering core gameplay concepts for the sake of streamlining the interface is antithetical to DF. So please keep in mind that while complexity that makes the same things needlessly hard to do is bad (e.g. obviously silly menu organization), complexity that keeps more things possible is very good and needs to stay.

If I were to suggest anything for furniture-based rooms, it would be some way to let you designate rooms from furniture that hasn't been placed yet (even better if the room isn't dug yet). That way you don't have to wait until something's built, and then come back to make it a room. That's a good example of making the process less complex while keeping the gameplay as complex as always.

[Dirst]

IIRC, the long-term trajectory for the game is for everything to become room-based.  That might build off of the furniture scheme (like a barracks) or the zone scheme (like a hospital).  Good ideas on how to make those as painless as possible would be important suggestions for the game, especially since the days of fixed-size workshops are numbered.  Admittedly it's a really really big number, but still.

[Jiri Petru]

It's actually really easy. Just allow the player to designate any area of any shape as a room (bedroom/barracks....), and then allow the player to place furniture in as needed. The rooms may even overlap as they already do - you'd just designate one room over the other, why not - so it's not like it would be reducing any complexity at all, Treefingers and Mathig. I'm merely suggesting a hack that would allow the player to designate the room first and place the furniture second because it's just logical.

Swapping the order will also allow you to place things like "bedroom" or "barracks" in the menu, which is a good thing! Because right now, just by reading menus, the player cannot even tell that things like bedrooms or barracks even exist. Bad design!