In reference to:
Req79, JOB CANCEL NOTICES, (Future): Option to turn off job cancel notices. Make it smarter about posting multiple notices in the first place by making jobs handle themselves when they are in trouble.
and
Req83, INTELLIGENT JOB HANDLING, (Future): More job suspensions rather than complete cancellations.
A couple of thoughts:
* Instead of the standard suspend (for Req83), in most cases use a new wait designation, which is functionally identical to suspend, except that it is automatically removed after some number of steps. Jobs might immediately be set to wait again if the conditions aren't right, but it's no worse than jobs added by the manager. Probably only set by dwarves, not the player.
* Either a special page or a filter under the job list dedicated to waiting/suspended jobs, to easily review the issues that are holding up progress and respond accordingly.
* For waiting jobs, remove announcements entirely and add an indicator at the top, either beside or alternating with the Idlers indicator. Probably red, to easily distinguish. Indicates the number of waiting jobs. Only jobs outright canceled by dwarves should get announcements.
E.g. you ran out of charcoal but wanted to smelt iron ore. Your wait indicator starts showing 1 task waiting. You hit j->w (or whatever) and see that the smelting task is suspended, because there is no fuel. Or you might see that a few item hauling tasks are suspended because dwarves are not allowed outside. Etc.
One other player-toggled job status that could be useful -- either applied directly in a workshop, through the job list, or through the manager window: pause/zoom on complete. So, if you're anxiously waiting for some task to finish ASAP, but still want to manage other parts of the fortress, this jumps over when the job finishes.
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Topic: Job interface tweaks (Read 458 times)