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[oldmansutton]

It is called manipulator. It is accessed in game. Dfhack inserts code for it.

http://dfhack.readthedocs.io/en/stable/docs/Plugins.html#manipulator

I can confirm it working in 64bit Linux.

This is basically Dwarf Therapist inside the game (as long as you have dfhack), and it's lovely.   I use this myself, and actually prefer it to Dwarf Therapist (don't have to leave the game window).

[k33n]

maybe because he has other, more important things to do?

There is literally no argument to be made for ANYTHING to be more important than UI functionality in any theory of design.

Would I rather another metric ton of features inaccessible behind a needlessly obfuscated wall of UI or would I rather have thousands of more people playing the game—therefore a stronger revenue stream for more features? I think the answer is so obvious you could see it from space.

[PatrikLundell]

maybe because he has other, more important things to do?

There is literally no argument to be made for ANYTHING to be more important than UI functionality in any theory of design.

Would I rather another metric ton of features inaccessible behind a needlessly obfuscated wall of UI or would I rather have thousands of more people playing the game—therefore a stronger revenue stream for more features? I think the answer is so obvious you could see it from space.

A pretty UI with no functionality behind it is worse than a poor UI with lots of functionality behind it in my view (to counter "literally no argument"). Personally I find UI design a boring necessary evil where people will complain about things regardless of what you do, because a lot of things are based on taste (there are also designs that are objectively worse than some other alternatives as well).
Apart from that, no reasonable UI face lift would get thousands of people to suddenly flock to DF to gawk on its lovely UI, as the mechanics behind it will remain as complex regardless, and the instant gratification crowd and graphics whores won't care one bit about an ugly character based interface game that require actual thinking to play.
I'm not saying the DF UI is good, as it's not, and there's a fair bit of room for improvement within its current structure. It usually gets the job done, however, and it seems to have a structure that allows modification and introduction of new things with a limited effort, which is immensely more valuable than a pretty UI that requires more effort to add stuff to for a project of DF's scope.

If k33n has an idea of a prettier, more functional UI it's "just" a matter of using DFHack to create one, as most or all things are available one way or another. If it's actually good other people will use it provided it's maintained. However, that project belongs to the utilities sub forum, not in this thread.

[mikekchar]

Would I rather [...] or would I rather [...]?

Note the use of personal pronoun.  If *you* would rather, then please act on *your* feelings.

Normally, I wouldn't get so involved in a conversation like this, but this is a touchy subject for me.  I've worked as a programmer for 30 odd years and while it's a fun and rewarding job, there is one thing that sucks beyond all measure.  There is always someone who is sitting there telling you how you have to do things.  If you work for a company building stuff, *none* of it is yours.  Someone else is prioritising.  Someone else is saying, "We have to ignore this work because we have to drive revenue in this other direction".  You can't even use the techniques you want -- it's always a big compromise based on what the group decides they want to do.  The only time you get a chance to build what you want is to run your own project.

And even if you give away the result of that project *for free*, asking only for *voluntary* donations, somebody wanders by and tells you that you are doing it all wrong.  Somebody puts *their* priorities over yours.  They don't give a damn about what you think or what you want to do.  They just care about what *they* want.

Seriously, if you want to be selfish, then by all means go ahead and run your own project.  This is Toady's place to be selfish, not yours.  You may think that you know what it takes to make a project successful.  I don't completely disagree with you, but you are missing more than you know.  Don't take my word for it, though.  Go ahead and try.

[k33n]

maybe because he has other, more important things to do?

There is literally no argument to be made for ANYTHING to be more important than UI functionality in any theory of design.

Would I rather another metric ton of features inaccessible behind a needlessly obfuscated wall of UI or would I rather have thousands of more people playing the game—therefore a stronger revenue stream for more features? I think the answer is so obvious you could see it from space.

A pretty UI with no functionality behind it is worse than a poor UI with lots of functionality behind it in my view (to counter "literally no argument"). Personally I find UI design a boring necessary evil where people will complain about things regardless of what you do, because a lot of things are based on taste (there are also designs that are objectively worse than some other alternatives as well).
Apart from that, no reasonable UI face lift would get thousands of people to suddenly flock to DF to gawk on its lovely UI, as the mechanics behind it will remain as complex regardless, and the instant gratification crowd and graphics whores won't care one bit about an ugly character based interface game that require actual thinking to play.
I'm not saying the DF UI is good, as it's not, and there's a fair bit of room for improvement within its current structure. It usually gets the job done, however, and it seems to have a structure that allows modification and introduction of new things with a limited effort, which is immensely more valuable than a pretty UI that requires more effort to add stuff to for a project of DF's scope.

If k33n has an idea of a prettier, more functional UI it's "just" a matter of using DFHack to create one, as most or all things are available one way or another. If it's actually good other people will use it provided it's maintained. However, that project belongs to the utilities sub forum, not in this thread.

Pretty is not functional. Functional is functional. User interface IS a game. Design is not an art, but an exact science. Its not graphics, its not a 'view'. It could still be ascii. UI has *nothing* to do with appearance or graphics. You can try to de-legitimize the facts by talking about 'pretty', but its just harming the game. If you can assign functionality to dwarfs in 6 seconds vs 30 minutes, it inst about graphics. If it takes 70+ clicks to do the same thing as 8 gestural mouse movements, we are not talking about aesthetics.

I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. I'm not being flippant, you just fundamentally misunderstand what a UI is. This is literally the best video game ever created, and it has a mortal wound.

[PatrikLundell]

maybe because he has other, more important things to do?

There is literally no argument to be made for ANYTHING to be more important than UI functionality in any theory of design.

Would I rather another metric ton of features inaccessible behind a needlessly obfuscated wall of UI or would I rather have thousands of more people playing the game—therefore a stronger revenue stream for more features? I think the answer is so obvious you could see it from space.

A pretty UI with no functionality behind it is worse than a poor UI with lots of functionality behind it in my view (to counter "literally no argument"). Personally I find UI design a boring necessary evil where people will complain about things regardless of what you do, because a lot of things are based on taste (there are also designs that are objectively worse than some other alternatives as well).
Apart from that, no reasonable UI face lift would get thousands of people to suddenly flock to DF to gawk on its lovely UI, as the mechanics behind it will remain as complex regardless, and the instant gratification crowd and graphics whores won't care one bit about an ugly character based interface game that require actual thinking to play.
I'm not saying the DF UI is good, as it's not, and there's a fair bit of room for improvement within its current structure. It usually gets the job done, however, and it seems to have a structure that allows modification and introduction of new things with a limited effort, which is immensely more valuable than a pretty UI that requires more effort to add stuff to for a project of DF's scope.

If k33n has an idea of a prettier, more functional UI it's "just" a matter of using DFHack to create one, as most or all things are available one way or another. If it's actually good other people will use it provided it's maintained. However, that project belongs to the utilities sub forum, not in this thread.

Pretty is not functional. Functional is functional. User interface IS a game. Design is not an art, but an exact science. Its not graphics, its not a 'view'. It could still be ascii. UI has *nothing* to do with appearance or graphics. You can try to de-legitimize the facts by talking about 'pretty', but its just harming the game. If you can assign functionality to dwarfs in 6 seconds vs 30 minutes, it inst about graphics. If it takes 70+ clicks to do the same thing as 8 gestural mouse movements, we are not talking about aesthetics.

I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. I'm not being flippant, you just fundamentally misunderstand what a UI is. This is literally the best video game ever created, and it has a mortal wound.

I beg to disagree.

I did not equate pretty with functional, it should be understood as pretty AND functional, although you can make it ugly and functional if you want. If UI design is a science, 99%+ of all designers have apparently failed their courses, with most of them sacrificing usability for what they think is pretty, or caters to their artistic ego.

And, again, if you want to create a UI according to your scientific principles go ahead and use the facilities provided via DFHack to do so (although your comment about mouse gestures indicates you're not interested in a keyboard based UI, in which case you'll probably have to write a gesture interpreter yourself, of find one somewhere).

[Fleeting Frames]

There is one somewhere, I recall a thread about reworking the df UI, one that mentioned commands for right click menus for instance...I think it was in this forum, actually, though most UI ideas are in suggestion forum.
However, I don't think it really went anywhere maintained, successful and popular*.


Now, I do love the utilities, scripts and plugins that speed up choosing things and searching for information the most, when it comes to DF mods. Auto-material, grazers, search, stocks, job-duplicate, lot of tweaks, legends mode utilities, etc...I hear ya, k33n, even if I haven't done enough research to the extent of the imposed penalty. After all, DT makes things like finding all dwarves in two hundred who like enormous corkscrews and getting them having weaponsmithing as highest skill reasonable instead of large undertaking.

Of course, somebody has to work on DT for it to work....

*Given the size of the community, popular is bit of a misnomer - if you have an idea for improvement done through dfhack, there is a thread to suggest scripts in 3rd party utilities, but if you really want something done or to know something you'll have to do it yourself, generally - even if someone is capable and actively working on gui, they'd rather work on whatever they're busy with right now likely.


Actually, I have to say this is something of a blessing in disguise. Whenever there's a thing in DF I'm not sure about, I have learned to not speculate or ask about for most things - I go straight to conducting an experiment to test it, as it usually beats waiting a day to get an useful idea and in the end often testing anyway. 

[steel jackal]

bah, yall got me excited, i thought that therapist for 0.43.05 had finally been figured out only to find out that its just the same debate over the UI

[PatrikLundell]

Well, there's a working layout for the 32 bit Windows version, at least.

[steel jackal]

Well, there's a working layout for the 32 bit Windows version, at least.

thats nice, but the difference between 32bit and 64 bit is massive for me, everything runs so much faster, especially on older forts.

forts that would be dead of fps death  in 32 bit (generally 10 years for me) still run perfectly fine in 64 bit

[feelotraveller]

There is a semi-working version you can build for linux 64bit.

Of course, somebody has to work on DT for it to work....

...and those who do not have the skills to do so need to work out how best to encourage those that do. 

[Pirate Santa]

It is called manipulator. It is accessed in game. Dfhack inserts code for it.

http://dfhack.readthedocs.io/en/stable/docs/Plugins.html#manipulator

I can confirm it working in 64bit Linux.

This is basically Dwarf Therapist inside the game (as long as you have dfhack), and it's lovely.   I use this myself, and actually prefer it to Dwarf Therapist (don't have to leave the game window).

Oh this thing has a name? Neat.
This is the singular thing I cannot play without. A way of viewing and changing labors for every dwarf in the fort without leaving the game.
I've tried therapist and I honestly don't like it. Not just because it requires tabbing over to a separate program, but also the sheer volume of information it holds is staggering and unless you are a hardcore micromanager who demands everything be perfect, it feels unnecessary.
I don't want to play excel spreadsheet the game, I just want a centralized single level menu.

[Fleeting Frames]

While I do feel manipulator isn't quite the same - I like to decide assigning dwarves new jobs more by their suitability in preferences and attributes and potential moods than their current skill in a job, plus I like how it gives overview of personalities and values for storytelling, and then there's the animal husbandry... - I've recently discovered that unlike therapist, manipulator also works on other unit viewscreens - including dead units and visitors/invades. I'll keep using gui/gm-unit for the individual ones who petition, but this is neat way to get an overview of performance troupe, for instance.

@feelotraveller: I meant more like that one has to learn the skills and work for it to be assured.

As for the linux one, I couldn't manage to get it's code to compile crashed computer at the j$ part. I guess I am missing dependencies or sth? *shrugs*

[k33n]

how dare you

If you think it is a selfish thing to care about the game and its future, you can keep thinking that. I could say a lot about working on a team with someone who has your attitude, but I would rather not.

If UI design is a science, 99%+ of all designers have apparently failed their courses, with most of them sacrificing usability for what they think is pretty, or caters to their artistic ego.

And, again, if you want to create a UI according to your scientific principles go ahead and use the facilities provided via DFHack to do so (although your comment about mouse gestures indicates you're not interested in a keyboard based UI, in which case you'll probably have to write a gesture interpreter yourself, of find one somewhere).

The objective reality of a good UI is the amount of time and mental fatigue created by completing a task, and the ability of that UI to lower both metrics. You'll need to show me these 99%+ people who have studied UX and UI and have a large test sample size to work with constantly creating bad design (you can't).

Toady should be at the very least correcting the terribad job management interface. The reasons why you try to shift the conversation to anyone else coding it allude me.

As it stands the recent version of the game has hemorrhaged the majority of its player-base and the rest are using older versions.

[Fleeting Frames]

The reason why PatrickLundall tries to shift the conversation to "anyone else" coding it is simple:

"If you absolutely want something done, do it yourself."

Something they themselves follow by coding scripts for dfhack.

Reworking the job management system and abandoning the VPL is scheduled. But it is not scheduled for next release - what's upcoming is artifact hunting, rework and myth generation.
But even if it was scheduled for next release doesn't mean it'd be available now, or that having a choice between it and non-vanilla UI wouldn't be nice, no matter the state of the UI now.

And even if I didn't know that, I have no real expectation for Toady One to do it, or for any updates tbh - I don't have a date to circle in calendar, that I'm eagerly waiting for. Though as relatively newer player, I suppose my perspective differs from someone who has done it all.