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[Deepblade]

Due to a generally well received alternative idea I had in the Option on bedrooms : Owner may engrave thread, I thought I'd look around and see if there was a thread with a similar idea about this already. While there were a few that mentioned it in some small form, they weren't all too substantial I felt. If I've overlooked a more detailed thread on this I apologize and ask that you please post a link to it and give their view on this.

The basic Idea I had was primarily for player control of decorations and engraving, but it could work as well with better dwarven autonomy and the economy.
Commissions are put out by the player through the manager screen, possibly moving to a Guild screen if/when we eventually get them. It goes a bit like this in my mind

• Manager screen
• Commission screen
• Choose Profession and dwarf/dwarves that will do the job
• Choose Job type if applicable(Craft Item or Add Decoration/Engrave)
• If the job/s is being commissioned by/for a dwarf then it should work off the dwarf's preferences and no more is required. Otherwise we keep on going down this list.
• Whether the job is craft or decoration you must choose the material to be used. If the crafted item is detailed, like a statue, you choose the exact details in the decoration screen. If you're adding decoration then you can choose the item type, or specific item to decorate. You could also just have it decorate anything like normal if you wanted to.
• Decoration Screen: First is the subject. Is the subject a historical figure, race, place, event, image or thing?
• Once you choose the exact subject you could complete the commission, or you can go into more detail.
  Example: You choose to craft a statue and you choose the subject as Dwarves. All the statues will randomly choose from the normal stuff a statue about dwarves could be about. Or, you can specify to create a statue of a generic dwarf in a regal stance, or that the dwarves are traveling. With the Historical Figures you could do depictions like that, or from actual events.

Engraving would go similarly, but I feel it'd be necessary to designate specific area, or areas, to be engraved. In addition this idea, I'd like to throw in murals, large engravings over several squares, could be done solely through commissions. It'd take up a larger area, be about one subject, and it would have one big value equal to the size and quality of each square. But, a bunch of single engravings in the same area should offer more value over all on average.

The biggest part to avoid the tedium that all this could have is that the last 5 or 10 commissions a player makes is saved and can be brought up for use later. Or, it could be can be edited so you could have a basic template. Or, you could save and name the commission permanently if it's something you particularly like. That way you could copy the saved commissions across worlds.

[Deboche]

This suggestion has often been made before but I like your way of going about it. You should also be able to determine the size, not all statues and engravings fit in one tile and it would be pretty cool to have a wall depict the whole of dwaven history or something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan's_Column

I also suggested once that sometimes things happen in your fortress that should be important events but dwarves don't regard them as such, like famines, floods, golden ages, finally finishing a grand work of masonry and so on and you should be able to somehow determine it to be an event worth engraving or making a statue out of.

[Deepblade]

This suggestion has often been made before but I like your way of going about it. You should also be able to determine the size, not all statues and engravings fit in one tile and it would be pretty cool to have a wall depict the whole of dwaven history or something like this:

So, multi-tile statues? That's brilliant! Until we have movable multi-tile objects the statue can just be built on the spot.

I also suggested once that sometimes things happen in your fortress that should be important events but dwarves don't regard them as such, like famines, floods, golden ages, finally finishing a grand work of masonry and so on and you should be able to somehow determine it to be an event worth engraving or making a statue out of.

Better event recognition and sorting would be great for all that. Like, Local history could be more detailed as opposed to what we know of the outside world. We could also have a custom event creator. Something simple where we could throw events into history that are harder for the game to keep track of. Such as, "On this day in History, Urist McKing has had the Dwarves of DoomedFortress begin work on the mega project 'Collapse the Sky'."

[Malaclypse]

I do think that part of the charm of engraving and crafting is that it is both random and heavily influenced by the dwarf doing the engraving or crafting. In my mind, player control of stuff like this should be more of a suggestion than a command. It should increase the chance of yielding the desired characteristics when stuff is randomly chosen, but still be quite dependent on chance.

[Deboche]

Yes but you wouldn't have the patience to select every statue, figurine and engraving. Most of them would still be left to chance.

Perhaps there could be themed engravings such as:
"Natural world" - Engravings of rock, animals, plants and so on
"History" - self-explanatory
"Industry" - Artifacts, masterpieces, legendary creations of artifacts

So that you could choose roughly what gets engraved where and what statues you want. I don't like having engravings of silly things in my tomb or of sad or violent things in my dining room.

Another option would be to have dwarves choose what kind of engraving they want if the room happens to be theirs or have the noble in charge mandate some engravings.

[Deepblade]

I do think that part of the charm of engraving and crafting is that it is both random and heavily influenced by the dwarf doing the engraving or crafting. In my mind, player control of stuff like this should be more of a suggestion than a command. It should increase the chance of yielding the desired characteristics when stuff is randomly chosen, but still be quite dependent on chance.

You're right. It is a part of the charm of the game, seeing your dwarf's personality reflected in those little details. But, there are certain occasions where we may want to commemorate a favorite dwarf, have statues of a god/s to make a shrine for RP purposes, have a room with a theme, or have hundreds of statues of something your least favorite dwarf detests so as to drive them insane. Those little things where you wanna take a few minutes to do something special.

Once you choose the exact subject you could complete the commission, or you can go into more detail.

What I meant by that was essentially what Deboche was talking about with the themed engravings.
By having everything into categories/themes we can be vague, or get really specific. Of course, there's always the possibility you'd never use this feature. But, it's always nice to have the option to be really detailed if you want.

[Khym Chanur]

Perhaps there could be themed engravings such as:
"Natural world" - Engravings of rock, animals, plants and so on
"History" - self-explanatory
"Industry" - Artifacts, masterpieces, legendary creations of artifacts

I'd add:

1) Religion.
2) Mythical/supernatural world (unicorns, dragons, etc)
3) Split history into fortress history, parent civ history and misc history.

[Scoops Novel]

I'd like to add that engravings should include a physical description of historical figures. Could be useful for family trees and portraits.

[Amena Ralikema]

There's only one thing I'd like to see - an option to manufacture/decorate armor with the civilization/fortress' emblem, like those the goblins have. Being envious of a goblin is not a condition a dwarf should endure.