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[Jiri Petru]

Post it here. Better to have it in one place. It's not like this thread is being used for anything else at the time, really.

[knight133]

Is there something like this to Download?

[Draco18s]

Is there something like this to Download?

This is in the suggestions forum.

This is not a mod.

[knight133]

ha Jiri Petru, I now know this isn't a mod but, can you make it a Total Interface Overhaul mod?

[10ebbor10]

ha Jiri Petru, I now know this isn't a mod but, can you make it a Total Interface Overhaul mod?

Sadly no. Not without decompiling and recompiling the source code*(Ie, reprogramming the game). There is a mousefort mod somewhere around the forums though.

*Before anyone asks, Toady is against implementing a UI api.

[Elvang]

Considering that stuff like stonesense is possible, wouldn't it be possible to use DFHack to create such a UI plugin? It can already designate constructions, mess with unit/item lists, manage workshop jobs, manage dwarf labors, etc.

[artemonster]

I am just feeling so awfully disappointed about the fact that devs don't do anything about these brilliant suggestions

[Draco18s]

I am just feeling so awfully disappointed about the fact that devs don't do anything about these brilliant suggestions

The interface is coming.  Maybe not in your lifetime, but it's coming

[annzilla]

I have only read parts of this thread, and so far I've seen a lot of very nice and quite elaborate ideas.
It all seems like quite the project though, and I was wondering if it's possible to start out with fixing the keys for scrolling through options?

I mean instead of having the arrow keys as well as +/-, just use the arrow keys. And instead of the different shortcuts for disabling/allowing/blocking etc. for example in in the stockpile settings, just relying on highlighting and pressing Enter.
Also, organizing menus alphabetically would be nice.

These are just minor changes but they would already make things a lot easier.
Even with the menus just as chaotic as they are now, one could at least concentrate on where to look for something, instead of wondering which keys to use to get there in the first place.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I think it's going to be a while until Toady One gets to the interface. I suspect it may be one of the latter items, infact, but feel free to suggest away.

[NW_Kohaku]

Every new major component of the game has an interface.  When military was redone, military got a new interface, and when doctors were added, there was the medical interface. 

Toady relatively recently redid the units list by adding "tabs", as a matter of fact, just to organize things.

Interface isn't something that is necessarily going to be done as an "arc".  (In fact, it's pretty silly to think that Interface can or should be rewritten all at once unless you're actually going to do the full GUI overhaul.)  It's more of a gradual refinement that Toady doesn't want to spend much time on, which is a pity, because Interface could be a serious low-hanging fruit at this point.

Even basic things like having an option to switch between "look" modes, having cursor memory if you jump out of a menu (especially a menu dozens of pages long, like the trade menu), and methods of sorting or automation would massively improve the capacity for players to grasp the game. 

The fact that the majority of players memory-hack their game just because memory hacks are the only way to collate the data they need to make decisions alone is proof that interface is a major handicap to being able to enjoy the game. 

Then there's Legends Mode - it's basically useless as it is in the game, and you need third party programs to actually organize the data into anything legible. 

[SirHoneyBadger]

I think the idea might be to get all of the components up and running, and grabbing bits and pieces of inteface-overhaul, as new components are reworked.

Then when the game has reached some alpha-state, to incorporate everything into one main body, and interface it all, then move on to polishing the result, as the game begins moving towards a beta-state.

It's frustrating (and I do mean that I'm personally frustrated by it, too.), but I also think that it's a choice that will eventually allow for a better overall result, since more aspects of the game will be able to be more smoothly incorporated, and it should be easier to debug, and also to get a feel for how well players are dealing with the result.

[Draco18s]

It's more of a gradual refinement that Toady doesn't want to spend much time on, which is a pity, because Interface could be a serious low-hanging fruit at this point.

He doesn't want to spend time on it and it's NOT low-hanging fruit, precisely BECAUSE of future changes which would rework large portions of the game which would make the interface work invalid (i.e. if an interface was made fancy, then the undelying mechanics altered* then that interface would no longer work and would have to be rebuilt).

*like the military was

[NW_Kohaku]

"Rewriting the whole thing" is not low-hanging fruit.

Rewriting the units menu so that it has tabs?  Yeah, that's low-hanging fruit.

Toady could rewrite the trade menu to use a tree system similar to the stocks menu, or introduce cursor memory (which he'd probably still want to use in later iterations of the interface, so it's not "wasted") without putting terribly much effort into it.

The argument that Toady "can't possibly do anything because it would take too much time and it would all be undone later" is a false choice between two extremes.

Besides which, there are a lot of bugs in his game that don't get fixed because his interface is so bad that nobody even notices when there are bugs.  The bug about stats not being trained by most jobs wasn't noticed by Toady because he never tested the game for a long enough period of time, there was no indicator for experience being gained, and it took people playing forts for years of game-time to ever notice the effects...

Then there's the eyelashes bug, where the game continually iterated the length of hair like eyelashes without ever stopping, taking up processor cycles, and never actually being measured in-game for anything.  Nobody even noticed that the dwarves had eyelashes two feet long by several game-years into the game for a long, long time, until memory hacking found it.

Which means Toady is throwing things into his game that he doesn't even realize are broken or nearly untestable because he's failing to throw in the low-hanging fruit of even putting on a window to see how the mechanisms in the game are working. 

That's not just low-hanging fruit, but it's actually something that saves him plenty of work in the long-term by catching bugs earlier on.

[RAM]

That would not be an interface thing, well, not a game-interface. It would be a testing interface. Maybe a separate window that collates all the instructions and attempts to make them legible. The detail portrayed by something like that would be inappropriate in most finished games.

Working regularly on the interface would be impractical. Things would change, overhauls would be required, and a lot of work would be wasted. One alternative would be to get the interface refined early and make sure that everything added conformed to it, which isn't fun and can end up with an ill-suited interface, because at this point we still don't know what the finished product would be like. For example, we still have no idea how abstracted battles between settlements is likely to be. Will the whole world be modelled at once? Will the lands around armies be modelled as they move? Will you send off a bunch of soldiers and receive a battle report later? Will you just make donations to your civilisation and have them become more or less dominant based upon your donations? These would all require very different things from the interface and some would be inappropriate for the current interface. As it is, the interface trundles along with various features being catered to as they occur. It produces a very messy interface, but it adapts easily with the game rather than expecting the game to conform to it. At some later date, once the game is clearly defined, an interface overhaul would be appropriate, but at present it seems that short of getting more people playing the game in its current state, focusing on the interface in inappropriate. I will admit however that the interface will tend to get very messy as long as it is updated to match individual changes in the game, and could become very nearly unplayable if no attention at all is paid to the interface as a distinct entity.