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[LordPorkins]

I believe so. If you have yiur cursor over something,  then hit escape and then Designate, you should have the corner of your grid where your cursor was.

((Ps, if you manage to get things going smoothly, post your fortresses status once in a while. This is some Hall of Legends type shit right here.))

[zkline]

Okay, I've managed to channel into a cavern, and have a staircase going down/up from that initial excavation. Liberal use of the look command helps a lot, along with using F1 to get back to my wagon.

Some initial impressions: it's hard to tell where the tile I've selected to designate is in relation to others without constant looking. I've mentioned this question before, and I think it would really help if I could keep the text-mode cursor on the game's idea of the selected tile most of the time. That way I can use my screen reader's review keys to move around without starting off at a random point. Maybe this kind of thing can be done with DFHack?
Speaking of DFHack, is it possible to run this with Print_Mode:Text? I wasn't sure how I'd bring up a console in that case—is there some unused punctuation symbol, a la Quake or the like?

The other thing which is kind of annoying at the moment is the way text mode handles redrawing the screen. The Look command output is only redrawn if it changes significantly, and my screen reader cues off those changes. So if I've got several cavern floors with the same stone or whatever, it won't actually repeat them, even though it probably should. This is more a technical issue, and I don't know how much can be done about it.

Finally, I noticed that sometimes tiles blink between two symbols. This is really annoying from an accessibility perspective, because the reader reads the blinking every time. Particular culprits seem to be letters/creatures, but I noticed my > stairway doing it too.

Despite my griping, I'm actually feeling pretty optimistic. This is going to be slow, but I'm confident things can be done to make things a lot easier. Honestly, that terminal cursor question will help 95% of the way on its own.

[Dirst]

The game sometimes flashes between two symbols when there are two or more "important" items in a tile, for example a rough gem sitting on a staircase or a tiger in a cage. When two or more creatures are on the same time, it will alternate between them with a very irritating animation in between of / - \ | / - \ |

Creatures in an unusual state will also flash, such as sleeping or enraged.

Not sure how if that behavior can be prevented in the main interface, but the iOS remote might be able to include an option for flashing.

[LordPorkins]

I am now going to vote for this on the Hall of Legends. Seriously tho, this is like one of those inspirational stories you read about people saying F.U. to unfortunate circumstances and ignoring limitations. Except, you know, nerdier.

[TheBiggerFish]

Heya.

You, sir, are a stubbornly persistent and awesome person.

Also PTW because this is the most epic thing I've seen in the past year.

[lethosor]

I believe so. If you have yiur cursor over something,  then hit escape and then Designate, you should have the corner of your grid where your cursor was.

Important: this is only true if you're using DFHack (specifically DFHack's "tweak stable-cursor", which is enabled in the default configuration).

Speaking of DFHack, is it possible to run this with Print_Mode:Text? I wasn't sure how I'd bring up a console in that case—is there some unused punctuation symbol, a la Quake or the like?

You can run commands with the dfhack-run script in the DF folder. If you run "./dfhack-run command-prompt", that will open a command prompt in-game, which might be more convenient. It's worth noting that neither of these methods will work with interactive console commands, like "liquids" (although "gui/liquids" will still work).

[zkline]

So I'm running into the quandary of sticking with the current version or migrating back to version 0.40 (?) for DFHack support. I use ArchLinux, so the current version is available pretty easily.

Does anybody more experienced have thoughts on this? I guess if I want to try out DF Remote I need to use the older version for now anyway.

[mifki]

Does anybody more experienced have thoughts on this? I guess if I want to try out DF Remote I need to use the older version for now anyway.

DF Remote will be useless for you right now, and by the time I add some map reading to it, it will support 0.42 I suppose

[lethosor]

So I'm running into the quandary of sticking with the current version or migrating back to version 0.40 (?) for DFHack support. I use ArchLinux, so the current version is available pretty easily.

DFHack supports 0.42 - the only releases so far are alphas, but they're fairly stable.
https://github.com/dfhack/dfhack/releases

[zkline]

So, I haven't managed to make much more progress, partially because I got sidetracked into messing with DFHack a bit, but…

A few idea to make things a bit easier to understand:

• It would help a lot if the type of the selected tile could be displayed when designating. Even if you're technically designating a rectangle, until I can be sure where the game's cursor is it seems to be pretty easy to select something unintended.
• On a similar note, maybe a script could take the "d," command from Look and start designation with the selected tile set as the start of the rectangle? Just for ease of use.

One more question, am I right in assuming that designation works rather like selecting cells in a spreadsheet? Moving right makes the rectangle 2x1, 3x1, etc, but moving up would make it 3x2, 3x3, selecting the tiles to the "left," of the cursor? Sorry if this is hard to understand, I always struggled a bit with spacial concepts.

Thanks for the thoughts and support.

[Pvt. Pirate]

when marking designations, i can only talk about how it's done with mousecontrol plugin:
you mark either two opposing corner blocks of the designation area.
when creating buildings, you enlarge the area by using u m h and k and it adds around the cursor position, always north, south, nord etc and east, west, east, west etc.

unifying the way building and designating would be a huge improvement to the game.

[Sanctume]

There is a difference between designating a room from an existing built furniture such as bed, armor stand, table, or chair. 
A player would normally use the q key and move the cursor over the furniture. 
For example I q over the bed, at which point I press r, and begin designate a room.
DF automatically pre-selects a default room size of around 4x4 or 5x5 in size. 
This pre-selects is reduces when there are walls and doors, so a bed in the middle of a 3x3 room, will pre-select a 4x4 area which includes the 3x3 room and the adjacent walls and door. 
Pressing the plus or minus key increases the diameter of that room size with the bed at its center.
Pressing enter at that point makes that designation of the room's size. 
If I recall correctly, the menu choices will be to resize the room, assign an owner, and free the room from current owner.

There is also designation for creating stock piles or zones. 
P for stockpile goes to the stockpile menu.
Usually this is the time to set what kind of of stock pile it is.
There are default settings such as Food, Stone, Armor, etc.
There is also a c for custom, the t for settings which allows you to choose a combination of from what is stocked, to materials such wood or metal, and even quality of items such as finely crafted to artifact.

Move the cursor to where to place the stockpile.
Pressing enter starts the designation from that cursor position. 
This cursor position is the anchor point of the square or rectangle, or even single tile.
Moving one right makes is 1x2, then moving one down makes it 2x2 with the anchor point from the upper left corner. 

If instead from the anchor point, moving up one and left one, this will make the size 2x2 also, but the anchor point will be on the bottom right corner instead. 

Pressing enter again commits to the size of that stock pile with the selected type of stockpile from either the defaults or custom settings.

And there is d designation for mining floors, up or down ramps, combinations of up/down stairs, channel.  And then the plant gathering and cutting down trees.  And also the smooth stone and carve fortification.  They will all follow the anchor point, and resizing the x-y or width and height; and also the z-axis for the depth.

--

Anyway, one idea I use a Hotkey, by default the key F1 centers on the wagon.  I am just not sure where the cursor is after pressing it.
This will give you a constant starting location.
I think dfhack has a function to get current cursor position, and move to cursor position.
That will help dictating (voice to text) and feed it to dfhack console perhaps?

[lethosor]

I've been thinking about how DFHack could improve accessibility - would it help to write stuff about the current screen in-game to a log file (i.e. would screen readers be able to deal with that)? This could include screen type, sidebar mode, various selections, cursor position and items under the cursor, and a variety of other things. It could also get rid of the Linux/OS X requirement for PRINT_MODE:TEXT, assuming it's usable enough.

[zkline]

Thanks. Designation with D at least works pretty much like I expected, I think.

The one thing with seems confusing is that, as far as I know, the text-mode terminal cursor and the game's idea of the cursor don't have much to do with each other. Can any DFHack people chime in on this? It's kind of hard to explain what I mean by "terminal cursor," I guess, since it isn't always obvious to people who don't rely on screen readers all the time.

Re: a log file, that's definitely an idea. Particularly on the OS X side it might make things easier, since OS X's accessible terminal support is iffy at best. I think in general DFHack has a lot of potential to help for accessibility, I just wish I knew more of what could be done with it.

[lethosor]

Yeah, I know what cursor you mean. It's a bit hard to figure out exactly where on-screen DF's cursor is in order to position the terminal cursor, though.
I'll look into logging. It seems that this can be used to speak the contents of a log file as it's generated on OS X, and presumably there would be alternatives on other platforms:

Code: [Select]

tail -f log.txt | while read line; do echo $line | say; done