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[IronGremlin]

One of the best things about this game is, far and above, the combat logs. They are phenomenally fun to read, and an absolute blast.

Unfortunately, they've become somewhat less accessible with this latest release - although the content is still fantastic, it takes quite a bit of doing to piece it all together after the fact, and you can't gracefully slow down and "watch" the combat play out.

I think it would be super neat if we had a "combat log viewer" that set the FPS to a lower default speed (like maybe 1 or even .5 FPS) and displayed all participants combat logs consolidated as a scrollable window along the bottom third or so of the screen.

Relevant buttons/controls to be accessible in this mode:

"Speed up" - Could be the same binding as the global FPS speed control, but it'd be good to put an actual GUI button on screen for this.
"Slow down/pause" - same as above, pause may not be explicitly necessary
"Frame advance" - same as above, doesn't need a new binding, it should just be a visible button to prompt the user that this is a control they have that they may find useful in this view.
"Jump to latest" - Centers the screen on the most recent entry in the log. The log entries could/should keep their little 'click here to go to the place this happened' button, so that's also always an option, this is just a convenience thing. The use-case this enables is that you could hold down the hotkey to zoom along with an active  combat - maybe a way to make this a toggle? It'd get kind of crazy if you had a bunch of stuff happening all over all at once, but the standard case of "8 goblins are at the front gate attacking you" it'd work really well for. Also the hilarity of randomly getting shunted 120 z-levels down into the bowels of your fortress in the middle of a siege to watch Stray Dog bite the Gelder for a frame would probably make up for the occasional strangeness.


This would make combat more viewable than it ever has been before - you could hit pause, crack out some popcorn, go into combat mode and just watch it play out.

[se5a]

With a good selection of colored text that differentiates hits, blocks, crits, deaths, etc. to your forces vs neutral vs enemy.
it's be nice to see a whole overview of the combat rather than having to focus on one specific unit.

[Putnam]

Unfortunately, they've become somewhat less accessible with this latest release - although the content is still fantastic, it takes quite a bit of doing to piece it all together after the fact, and you can't gracefully slow down and "watch" the combat play out.

I agree that it's not great, but, uh, it was literally identical before this latest release. You still had to piece it together after the fact, it was organized the exact same way and you couldn't slow down and "watch" the combat play out then, either.

[IronGremlin]

Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I thought for sure the "you absolutely must be paused to see the logs at all" was new. Like I don't remember the 'workflow ' of open log, read, advance time, open log...

Maybe keyboard shortcuts just blended that all together in my head? A lot of that stuff does become kind of autopilot once you get used to it.

The organization thing is only really a "special" beef now due to not having persistent logs - it's easy to accidentally dismiss shit. It was always some defective work to piece that together, and I think I sort of understand why asking for a consolidated log isn't exactly a small ask given the whole multiple perspective thing.

[Putnam]

Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I thought for sure the "you absolutely must be paused to see the logs at all" was new. Like I don't remember the 'workflow ' of open log, read, advance time, open log...

The old way to open the logs was to press r, which would open the "reports" screen, which was full screen and prevented unpausing completely; after that, you'd go through a list of "X is fighting!" entries and find which one you're looking for, just as now.

[Homo carbonis]

I really like this idea. Perhaps it could be modelled on how combat is presented in adventure mode.

You lose the immediacy of the drama if it's all over in a flash and you have to work out what has happened from the logs afterwards. Though I suppose there is a realism to the current situation. A real battle would be too confusing and unfold too quickly for anyone to have a complete idea of what was happening.

[ayy1337]

Being able to advance by 1/5/10 frames while reading combat logs would be sweet ngl

[Bumber]

Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I thought for sure the "you absolutely must be paused to see the logs at all" was new. Like I don't remember the 'workflow ' of open log, read, advance time, open log...

Thinking of the Announcement Window utility?

[IronGremlin]

Nah, it's probably just my brain lying to me about the past, that happens.

Regardless, it seems like the kind of thing that would be cool if it existed - but you'd need to slow down the game a lot for it to be enjoyable.