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...