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[Sowelu]

So, when you look at a bucket, or a bed, or something, it just tells you how much it weighs.  And maybe that it's encrusted with gems.

If you look at a stone, it doesn't tell you hardly anything if it's not economic.

And looking at a beak dog, of course, doesn't say much either.

That oughtta change.


I propose that viewing any object should give information about that object, as well as more general stuff.  If you look at microcline, it should tell you what's special about microcline, AND about rock in general.  If you look at a beak dog, it should tell you what a beak dog looks like--and if the player knows that it came with a goblin siege, it should give information about that siege.  If you look at an iron sword, it should tell you stuff about swords, and stuff about iron, and maybe even stuff about *quality*.


The list of what helpfiles need to be displayed is definitely a hard part.  Ideally, eventually everything would get tagged by a name of a helpfile, preferably multiple, preferably dynamic stuff.

However the helpfiles themselves can be a community effort.  That much has been suggested before, but...eh.

I'd like to see something in raws with tags like:
[HELPFILE:STONE_MICROCLINE]
Text goes here...
[HELPFILE:STONE_GRANITE]
Text goes here...

Or heck, I don't know much about raws, maybe it would look more like:
[HELPFILE:STONE:GRANITE]
[HELPFILE:CREATURE:BEAK_DOG]

In any case.  ALL helpfiles are loaded, and you can have your 'stone' entries split across multiple files, or have creature entries in your stone files, etc.  Not sure how to handle redundant stuff, but maybe just take the last one--and maybe flag that there's a duplicate in the logfiles.

For aiding the community, I'd propose a new init flag:  [DEBUG_HELPFILE].  When that's turned on, a blank helpfile is displayed in-game as the name of the missing tag.  So if you look at microcline and there's no microcline help file, you just see '[HELPFILE:STONE:MICROCLINE]'.  That way you know what needs to be written.

In addition to tilesets, people can write and download helpfile sets.  So you can grab Bob's geology helpfiles over here, which have two or three paragraphs of flavor text for every stone.  And Alice's creature helpfiles, which do the same.  Or you can get Fred's creature helpfiles, instead, which are less serious and more humorous.

And when Zed creates a mod, he can package his helpfiles along with it.

I dunno if helpfiles should be allowed in the creature_standard or whatever files, it's probably best if they stay separate.


...It always annoys me, no, makes me feel a little angry or betrayed when I look at some items in a game and they are described, but others are blank.  I've kind of tuned that out for DF, but it would make me so much happier if this was implemented...

[Vattic]

Indeed, cant agree more.

I suggest you keep them seperate, walls of text in certain files could be annoying.

It might be interesting to be able to install multiple helpfiles, so say there were 2 or more entries for breakdogs it would display the in the order it finds them leaving a double linebreak between entries.

[Footkerchief]

I thought Rockphed's suggestion for dynamically generated "help" pages was much more sensible:

The thing is, I wasn't suggesting writing all of that stuff out more than once each.  I was thinking that DwarfFort would look at the item type and put up a statement about it.  Things like, "Stone is used to make furniture and blocks at the mason's workshop, build crude walls and buildings, and make Crafts at the Craftsdwarf's Workshop,"  would be inserted into the '?' screen brought up by selecting any stone.  If the stone is used in a reaction, then it would be mentioned in the next paragraph.  Currently pressing [enter] while selecting a stone with the 'k' command brings up exactly that list of reactions that use the stone or bar.  In fact, you can then look at what else is required for the reaction by pressing [enter] while selecting the specific reaction.  The problem is that none of this is currently easy to figure out for newbies.  If every screen had a '?' with "help" next to it at the lower right corner of the screen, it would be much easier for new players to think, "I have no idea what is going on, but there is a friendly help command, so I can possibly get some more information."

Most of the text in those HELPFILE entries would be highly redundant boilerplate.  Especially now that materials have been universalized, it wouldn't be difficult for the game to intelligently pick out interesting properties of the material (or uses of an item, or whatever) for presentation to the player.

[Sowelu]

Hmm.  Stuff generated directly from the data could be nice but it wouldn't be flavorful, and I'm worried it would take a lot of the life out of creatures and stuff.  It WOULD be useful to know exactly what could be created with what...

...but it wouldn't be smart enough to figure out it should say "Thrones can be placed next to a single table of its own in a dining room to allow a dwarf to sit and eat, or can define an office or throne room that you can assign to a noble".  That stuff needs to be written by hand.  Especially for things like querns.

[Footkerchief]

Hmm.  Stuff generated directly from the data could be nice but it wouldn't be flavorful, and I'm worried it would take a lot of the life out of creatures and stuff.  It WOULD be useful to know exactly what could be created with what...

I'm not sure flavor text really belongs in help files.  But my concern was more practical -- the more's handwritten in the help files, the harder they are to maintain.  Yeah, handwritten text is probably necessary to fill in some of the details about oddball items, but it should be kept to an absolute minimum.

[Toady Two]

Just add separate(helpful) entries for each item in the wiki.

[Sowelu]

Actually, the point of this is to make the game more accessible to people who don't want the wiki up at all times.  People who want to play fullscreen on their first game, for example.

_{also the flavor text really made games like Nethack way more fun, while ADOM by comparison has harsh utilitarian descriptions that aren't nearly as fun to read because they are programmatic}

[Warlord255]

I think creature descriptions (dynamic ones, at that) are coming next version - let's see how that turns out first.

[Capntastic]

I suggested this the week the game came out, and Toady said something along the lines of not wanting to have to rely on the community to do stuff, or have to edit, or work with so many on such an intimate level.

As such, while not the perfect solution, I think that the wiki suffices, until such time as Toady works in proper descriptions on his own, or appoints someone to help with it.

[scale_e]

Actually, the point of this is to make the game more accessible to people who don't want the wiki up at all times.  People who want to play fullscreen on their first game, for example.

I bogarted my mates monitor, and are currently using it as my 2nd, for that exact purpose.

I think a more developed wiki would be a much more appropriate of a solution. This is because putting stuff like that in-game forces the player to use less imagination. Which is, imho, a bad thing.
I think the DF veterans should give a bit back to the wiki in this regard.
Personally, I've only been playing DF for about a year and a half now, and wanted to play it for a lot longer before I started doing things like adding to the wiki.

And looking at a beak dog, of course, doesn't say much either.
If you look at a beak dog, it should tell you what a beak dog looks like

Wtf is a beak dog. I couldn't find ANYTHING about beak dogs.
The closest I could find was this...
http://www.montauk-monster.com/
It's a dog shaped sort of thing with a beak.
But then Toady said a beak dog is sort of like a velociraptor... so maybe they look like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodon

[Sowelu]

I think a more developed wiki would be a much more appropriate of a solution. This is because putting stuff like that in-game forces the player to use less imagination. Which is, imho, a bad thing.

Wtf is a beak dog. I couldn't find ANYTHING about beak dogs.

I'm pretty sure you just explained why some things are important to have...

Although, now that I think about it, once there's random creatures this won't make sense for critter descriptions.

Anyway, you should NEVER have to be creative when it comes to "what are the rules of the game".  Basic rules, like "you can use a chain for these purposes", should be freely given to the player as accessibly as possible.  They are not game secrets, there shouldn't be a great joy in discovering that you can use them in wells in addition to chaining dogs up.  It should just BE there, freely readable.

[Footkerchief]

This is what beak dogs are.