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[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not talking about "refining the interface", nor "an overhaul", I'm talking about building an interface that works for the game we already have, and making each new chunk of code have an interface that actually works when it comes into the game.

Working on the interface constantly and in small, iterative steps is the only practical way to handle the game.

If we are the alpha testers of this game, we need to have access to the information that is being passed around in the game to know when things are going wrong.  (Or are we to believe that we are not in an alpha, and we are to treat everything in the game as though it is a finished product?)

Further, if you step away from the false dichotomy choices of "the only alternative to doing everything now is doing nothing now", you can easily see many things that need to be done for the long-term for the game that would be of great benefit, now, and could be kept without scrapping later.

Cursor memory, implementing basic scripting commands like the Standing Orders suggestion (which was the top ranked eternal suggestion, along with many other interface tweaks in the top ten like automining veins), putting in simple keypress links between information-gathering modes, working on ways to put information on the same page as the decision pages, and developing the automation and autonomy of the actions of the dwarves in general.

That last part, especially, will never be completed in a single thrust, and understanding the quirks of how it is (and will be) built will have a dramatic impact upon how the game is designed going forward. 

You can paper a GUI over all the bare gears in the engine later in some big "overhaul" if you want, but the basic mechanics for the interface need work now, and when you've done a proper skeletal interface, you can actually have a much better grip on not only how the game works, but on how the player will eventually approach the game.

Don't lie to yourself - the way that you see the game now significantly colors the way you actually think about or do things.  Playing the game by Stonesense means caring about things far different from things you care about when you play the game normally.

I'm probably one of the very, very few players who actually builds multiple vertical shafts to compact my fortress vertically, rather than spreading out the fortress in a bunch of huge, clunky rectangle rooms specifically because players only view one floor at a time, and the digging tool favors rectangles.  Central staircase designs are a direct artifact of the current interface. 

If you change that interface, you change the way that players approach the game.  How?  You'll have no idea until after you do it.

We rely almost entirely upon hacks and micromanaged tweaks to make the game work in its current state - if we are ever going to get a game that works properly, Toady needs to start work on understanding how the player should be controlling their dwarves... And right now, Toady really doesn't have an earthly clue.  He can't even give a committal answer on how much autonomy or direct control players even should have over dwarves in general. 

In fact, the longer Toady puts off understanding how to build an interface, the worse it will be for him to fix many of its problems, for much the same reason that putting off fixing bugs and building more systems on top of the bugs only makes the bugs far more difficult to fix.

Besides which, by these measures, why should Toady be implementing goblins and sieges into the game now when he's just going to change how sieges work in the future?  Or do you like having them in there to be able to enjoy playing the game?

What about raws?  Rawifying everything will take a long time, but the more Toady works on making sure that all his new things are in the raws, the easier the eventual rawification of the game will go, because so much of the rest of the game is already prepared for being transitioned.

It's a bizarre double standard to say that we should encourage Toady to make complex systems, but asking that we actually be able to see and interact with those systems is somehow too much of a burden upon him.

The case of the eyelashes is an especially egregious case of a fetishism for simulation without practical interface - if nothing in the game interacts with that mechanic, if the player can never see it, if you can't even notice whether that mechanic is even there or not, why, exactly, is it there, eating up memory and processor time every single tick counting down to the next time when the hair will grow another millimeter?  (And it was bugged, and nobody ever even knew it until memory hacks revealed it over a year after it was coded in! Toady never even bothered testing or figuring out a way for anyone else to test it.)

This is the perfect case example of what not thinking about the interface will produce - a perfectly useless mechanic that merely exists to eat processor time.  That's why thinking about the interface at every step along the way is the only practical way to code a game.

[Destyvirago]

I got to say I am 100% behind NW_Kohaku on this.
My biggest hope is that when the Toady one finishes the current arch, he will spend some times fixing bugs that we have know about a long time as well as getting a better interface going.
I have read though the suggestions posted in this forum and I see that there are many good suggestions here. Of course not every one is equally good or practical to implement, but there are many suggestions here that can make the gameplay better and less of a fight against the interface. Pretty much all of us that post here are fans of DF and have already climbed the very steep learning curve to understand the game, but that does not really change the fact that the interface is pretty much non-existing at the moment.

I believe there is much to be gained from starting to fix the interface now instead of later as that will only make the task harder. Naturally some will fear change, but I think it will greatly help DF to be more accessible to new players. DF is simply such a good game that I think more people should get the chance experience it, but atm the interface is a huge barrier. More players mean more donations and that will help fund the development of DF further. 

[SirHoneyBadger]

I'm glad and grateful for the enormous efforts and sacrifices that Toady One endures to put out the game. It's more than I am capable of, and seems fairly superhuman to me, to be honest.

At the same time, I can only guess that he's working on the parts of the game that just happen to interest him at the time. It's not a logical progression, because it's not meant to be logical, it's meant to be fun for him, so that he feels less pressure to get away from the game entirely.

Obviously, I'm being an apologist here, and I agree with the points being made, from a rational view, but from the viewpoint that this is a labour of love, and that it's meant to be less like work and more like fun, it's hopefully more understandable.

Toady One seems to be entertaining himself, by manufacturing entertainment for us, but he's doing so in a way that remains entertaining for him, in equal portions.

[zwei]

low-hanging fruit

There are many thing that can be done one at a time.

My favorite example are sorted menus:

Currently, items that come from raw are displayed in order in which they are loaded.

Finding "goblin" in corpse stockpile settings is nearly impossible thanks to huge amount of critters transalted to pages upon pages of listing.

If game sorted those items aplhabetically, it would have been much easier to find your (rocks|plants|bars|whatever) in stockpile and turn them on/off.

This sort can be done after loading raws - and thus at zero performance cost during gameplay. And it is dead simple to implement.

I'm glad and grateful for the enormous efforts and sacrifices that Toady One endures to put out the game. It's more than I am capable of, and seems fairly superhuman to me, to be honest.

At the same time, I can only guess that he's working on the parts of the game that just happen to interest him at the time. It's not a logical progression, because it's not meant to be logical, it's meant to be fun for him, so that he feels less pressure to get away from the game entirely.

Obviously, I'm being an apologist here, and I agree with the points being made, from a rational view, but from the viewpoint that this is a labour of love, and that it's meant to be less like work and more like fun, it's hopefully more understandable.

Toady One seems to be entertaining himself, by manufacturing entertainment for us, but he's doing so in a way that remains entertaining for him, in equal portions.

If he enjoys it, it is not sacrifice. Labor of love is also meant to be loved by audience. Artistry is a lot about refining what you have instead of producing new stuff.

[Alu]

An object/entity-window would be a great addition for this I think.
So when you select an object or, for example a dwarf, you get an ascii art with matching colors and all
Should be feasible, except for artifacts and forgotten beasts.
Something like this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[JanusTwoface]

An object/entity-window would be a great addition for this I think.
So when you select an object or, for example a dwarf, you get an ascii art with matching colors and all
Should be feasible, except for artifacts and forgotten beasts.
Something like this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

How do you represent modded creatures? Particularly ones with completely alien (relative to the vanilla game) body structures? The way you can lay out bodies, you can get all sorts of strange things going on.

I guess you could probably add it into the tags. But one problem with this is it sort of defeats the point of having everything in ASCII. Freed from the needs of graphically representing new additions to the game, Toady One can add all sorts of interesting things in and let a text description and our imaginations fill in the rest. Having to add in new code to draw any sort of new creature / object slows that down.

[NW_Kohaku]

How do you represent modded creatures? Particularly ones with completely alien (relative to the vanilla game) body structures? The way you can lay out bodies, you can get all sorts of strange things going on.

I guess you could probably add it into the tags. But one problem with this is it sort of defeats the point of having everything in ASCII. Freed from the needs of graphically representing new additions to the game, Toady One can add all sorts of interesting things in and let a text description and our imaginations fill in the rest. Having to add in new code to draw any sort of new creature / object slows that down.

Actually, given the way that the physics system is evolving, it may actually make more sense to have it declared in the raws how the body is structured, since we already are including the likes of attack directionality. 

I think that there's just a hardcoded concept that the [STANCE] parts should be on the bottom and [THOUGHT] parts should be at the top (and harder for dwarves to reach if a really large creature, like a colossus) but if we're going to have more realistic models going forward, then changing the raws into dictating where each part is in relation to another part it is connected to would make sense.

(It's also the problem of how heads are connected directly to torsos, and necks are just sort of hanging off of heads right now...)

We also need to incorporate the idea of cylindric body parts, so that all body parts aren't represented as though spheres vaguely stuck together.

[SirHoneyBadger]

How do you represent modded creatures? Particularly ones with completely alien (relative to the vanilla game) body structures? The way you can lay out bodies, you can get all sorts of strange things going on.

I guess you could probably add it into the tags. But one problem with this is it sort of defeats the point of having everything in ASCII. Freed from the needs of graphically representing new additions to the game, Toady One can add all sorts of interesting things in and let a text description and our imaginations fill in the rest. Having to add in new code to draw any sort of new creature / object slows that down.

It's really unfortunate, but making any suggestions about changing the game from ANSII to anything else, even in partitioned areas of the game, just gets you yelled at by the community.

I haven't ever heard Toady One specifically be adamant on this point (and it's my--limited--understanding the dwarfs themselves are built with something other than ANSII), but there are some hardcore zealots out there that are very against changing the basic graphic mode of the game in any particular, regardless of the reason.

Personally, I'd like to see the game automatically switch over to sprites, once ANSII are exhausted, but artificially keep and promote ANSII as the basic and important mode of the game.

I'd also love to see wireframe implemented into the game in some manner, ala 'Dungeons of Daggorath' (Grandfather of all first-shooters, and still awesome incarnate over 30 years later)--Adventure mode would be an obvious choice--but people were literally coming out of the woodwork to vehemently disagree, even though these were all useful, popular (and easy to code) graphic displays from the same exact era, offered as respectful of ANSII, and suggested only as being supplimental to ANSII.

Good luck on that, though. I'm done pressing for it, atleast for a while, although I'd really like to know how "carved in slade" Toady One feels ANSII is, just for the sake of illumination.

[RAM]

The current graphics are what it has had for a good long while now and the community has built around that, so it is natural that people would be resistant to changing that. Add to that the simple fact that symbolic graphics have many advantages over immersive graphics, particularly in complex environments such as Dwarf Fortress, in fortress mode at least, then there is bound to be challenges to anything that would alter the approach to the game's display.
 It seems odd to me that the quote used should be captioned with the phrase "yelled at by the community". It starts with a legitimate question that could be easily taken as an opportunity to promote the virtues of the proposal or to adjust it to better suit the subject matter. It then goes on to describe why the poster enjoys the current arrangement and finds the proposal at odds with it. It is true that there may be some what of a presumption that the current graphical display is intended and proper, but really, all things considered, the quoted excerpt seems to be constructive well beyond any problems that it may create.
 
 I suspect that Toady just has more interesting things to work on, but that is pure speculation on my part.

 Sprites and text appearing concurrently would look somewhat haphazard, as though the creator of the game had started building sprites but then stopped. Such an arrangement could potentially gain some value if used to create contrast, perhaps by having terrain use pictures and creatures/buildings use symbols, which would free up some symbols, but just using pictures as overload relief would seem likely to come off as messy.

 I am not familiar with D.o.D. but the idea of game-generated graphics does seem to have some potential. It could produce three dimensional renditions of a fortress(Though likely only represent whether a space is full or empty.), generate a stick-figurish portrayal of creatures, objects, and engravings that could be seen in their descriptions, perhaps even, as you suggest, some sort of personal-view exploration mode that could let someone play first-person adventures or tour their fortress. But all this would require significant information to be added to all physical entities and a lot of programming for something which seems rather tangential the current mechanics of the game...

[NW_Kohaku]

I remember that 40d had an unimplemented visualizer.

I'm fairly sure Toady's resistance to switch to anything beyond Curses was just his lack of desire to spend any more effort on it than necessary.  If he started making graphics, he'd have to make graphics for everything he added.

For that matter, Toady's starting to hit the limits of what you can do with just 256 characters, since he has to start adding in "invert" just to make more use of the ones he already has for the minecarts. 

I think that, at a basic level, we're getting near a point where he might start using "graphics sheets" that involve more than just one type of font (maybe including a split between worldmap and local typesetting) along with the fact that we have TrueType fonts, now.

Hopefully, something like what Stonesense has been doing will be included sometime soon, and we can start having multiple image layers on a single tile.  That can mean we start getting status displays in-game by having icons hover over a dwarf.  (For example, represent talking with a speech bubble, like in The Sims, which might hover between the tiles of the talking dwarves.)

[zwei]

I remember that 40d had an unimplemented visualizer.

I'm fairly sure Toady's resistance to switch to anything beyond Curses was just his lack of desire to spend any more effort on it than necessary.  If he started making graphics, he'd have to make graphics for everything he added.

For that matter, Toady's starting to hit the limits of what you can do with just 256 characters, since he has to start adding in "invert" just to make more use of the ones he already has for the minecarts. 

I think that, at a basic level, we're getting near a point where he might start using "graphics sheets" that involve more than just one type of font (maybe including a split between worldmap and local typesetting) along with the fact that we have TrueType fonts, now.

Hopefully, something like what Stonesense has been doing will be included sometime soon, and we can start having multiple image layers on a single tile.  That can mean we start getting status displays in-game by having icons hover over a dwarf.  (For example, represent talking with a speech bubble, like in The Sims, which might hover between the tiles of the talking dwarves.)

Yes, 40d had one-layer only visualizer that id not really visualize much.

You are very correct about running out of character-tiles. We already have doubles: xxx (stairs next to to bin next to to archery target), in fact we have had many doubles for years.

I would think that community could easily fill order of tiles where authors surrender copyrights to toady and maintain given art style.

Thou obvious problem would be to filter crap out. Anytime website/project does logo contest, there is too much crap flowing in.

[Scorus]

Apologies if this has been suggested, I haven't read the entire thread.

One non-graphical item that is already in the game that could be spread to other menus is the way we can narrow the work order list by typing in part of the name (e.g. throne, copper, bone, etc.). If this were possible in the corpse and animal lists, for instance, then that would be helpful.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Apologies if this has been suggested, I haven't read the entire thread.

One non-graphical item that is already in the game that could be spread to other menus is the way we can narrow the work order list by typing in part of the name (e.g. throne, copper, bone, etc.). If this were possible in the corpse and animal lists, for instance, then that would be helpful.

I'm not sure if it has been, either (I think it probably has...), but yes, that would be really nice to be able to type "toy steel anvil", instead of having to hunt for it, so it's a good idea.

[Chagen46]

I remember that 40d had an unimplemented visualizer.

I'm fairly sure Toady's resistance to switch to anything beyond Curses was just his lack of desire to spend any more effort on it than necessary.  If he started making graphics, he'd have to make graphics for everything he added.

For that matter, Toady's starting to hit the limits of what you can do with just 256 characters, since he has to start adding in "invert" just to make more use of the ones he already has for the minecarts. 

I think that, at a basic level, we're getting near a point where he might start using "graphics sheets" that involve more than just one type of font (maybe including a split between worldmap and local typesetting) along with the fact that we have TrueType fonts, now.

Hopefully, something like what Stonesense has been doing will be included sometime soon, and we can start having multiple image layers on a single tile.  That can mean we start getting status displays in-game by having icons hover over a dwarf.  (For example, represent talking with a speech bubble, like in The Sims, which might hover between the tiles of the talking dwarves.)

If Toady could figure out how to use more than just normal ASCII, then we wouldn't have this problem...there's literally thousands of other characters he could use.

I like your "multiple image layers on a tile" idea, though.

[NW_Kohaku]

If Toady could figure out how to use more than just normal ASCII, then we wouldn't have this problem...there's literally thousands of other characters he could use.

I like your "multiple image layers on a tile" idea, though.

He already has figured it out - the game doesn't use ASCII, it uses any arbitrary image that it is directed to use, and dices it up into 256 tiles.

It already is using "graphics" even in vanilla, it's just a (badly resized) picture of a font instead of any actual font.

The only thing stopping Toady from putting in full graphics support whenever he feels like it is Toady. 

He could change one variable, and expand the size of the basic "curses" graphic and add double, triple, quadruple, or whatever arbitrary amount as many tiles for modders to choose from as part of the basic tileset.  We already have raw-ified custom workshops where you can choose whatever tile you want. 

In fact, there's little stopping Toady from going into allowing full "graphics" like with creatures, instead of being limited to two colors. As far as I can tell, he's mostly just too attached to the hard-coded tricks he put in when he was trying to be clever with the not-really-ASCII; For example, the " sign used for kobolds in the darkness turning into a ' when you put out an eye.

Meanwhile, if he simply embraced layered graphics, you could actually do something similar with graphics.  Again, you can just have a "single eye" graphic and a "both eyes" graphic.  It's just not "clever" if you use the proper tools for the job instead of trying to repurpose fonts into images, that's all.

At the same time, again, much of the game is focused upon what you can actually see happening. If you included layers and put images "between" tiles, you could convey ideas like "this dwarf is talking to that dwarf" by putting a speech bubble between the two dwarf tiles.  You could even throw some sort of Sims-like icon on the bubble to let the player see what is actually being discussed, and that could let players get clued in when some sort of event is part of a rumor, and that would clue them in to zoom the interface in to look at what rumors are being discussed in some more detailed rumor mode.  (For example, you could have a rumor of a dwarf that's been missing for a few days indicated by an icon, which might prompt the player to look at the rumor to see who's missing, then go and start putting out search parties for that dwarf.)

Again, what a player can see is crucial to how they can understand the mechanics of the game, and as such, those parts of the interface are crucial to build with the mechanics they display. 

When players can't get the information they need to play the game without relying on memory hacks (not "to look more pretty," just to be able to play the game) it's indicative of how much more Toady needs to think about interface as he's designing the game.