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[Jiri Petru]

Guys, before we derail the thread completely, can I ask you not to dwell on the keyboard/mouse issue? I know I stated in the OP that the interface would be mouse only. Looking back now, I see no reason why it should be. You can easily make keyboard shortcuts for anything, I just didn't focus on them.

See this post for explanation.

Thanks.

[RAM]

As I say I would like a perpetual information panel. It could show FPS, idles, all entities on the selected tile,. keyboard shortcuts... The ideal would be to never have to stop what you are doing in order to get relevant information and to always be able to look in the same place to get the same generically useful information...

[Grax]

hodiernal

As a Latin student I'm appalled that I've never seen this word before.

Heh. Now you can say you've seen it once. ;-)

I'm russian, so my english vocabulary that i learned at school/university comprises somewhat 5-6 (or maybe 10 maximum) thousands "everyday-words", so other "non-everyday" words are coming from dictionary.

[juanoleso]

I just wanted to make some improvements to my original mockups...see if there is any interest in keeping this thread alive ^_^

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(zoom feature)

Tried to take into account some of the OPs thoughts and also a few of the things I saw in the thread.

1.) everything would have a hotkey or possibly even two.  To get into the menus on the side the top leaf would be "1", second from top would be "q", third would be "a", and fourth would be "z" or you could hold alt and then press the first letter of the menus title, for instance engineering and construction would be alt+e

2.)  I didn't have time to think about it, but the submenus would be divided so each menu would have no more than 9 items.  Each item could them be assigned a hotkey q,w,e,a,s,d,z,x,c (maybe twelve including 1,2,3) (thank you, lesconrads)

3.) Pressing the hotkey would pop the chosen menu and it would then tack until cleared with space bar.

4.) where is the mini-map?  Well in the future (!!!) we will be able to zoom in and out.  Mouse scroll or ctrl+up/ctrl+down will zoom.  (I guess this one is a suggestion of its own)

5.) left click and hold on an item/building/dwarf to bring up an interaction menu. right clicking recenters view where you clicked.

6.) Messages can be expanded and contracted to any size and then can be sorted by type of message with the dropdown.  Click on message to zoom to event.

7.) the little status tabs next to menu can show a certain stat.  Click to change which stat to view (up now are dwarves, prepared food, and drinks).

If these aren't any good, feel free to comment as such.  I just wanted to get my ideas out of my head onto paper.

Thanks for reading!

[Lap]

Still voting for Jiri's originals, with "{x}'s"  showing the keyboard shortcut next to all options (square brackets look better but this forum doesn't like them).

Using radial menus is a good idea for some things, but as sad before if you have to go through many rings to get what you're looking for it is a failed endeavor. Exactly what uses radial menus would need to be very specific. Only things that have limited options, that almost always stay the same are eligible for radial menus. The main advantage of radial menus is that players learn that moving their mouse to a certain direction should always give the same options. Having things move around on the radial or having simply massive radials means you're better off having nested drop down listed that are easier for eyes to scan.


It really saddens me at how little effort is being put into UI and graphics support. All of us at the forums obviously tolerate or like the current system. The amount of people that would be able to experience (and possibly even donate) to DF would go up immensely with even small improvements to UI or graphics. I saw a huge number of new players join just from seeing most of the characters get tile graphics.

I've gotten so many people into roguelikes by showing they TomeTik, ZangbandTK, or Dunegon Crawl Stone Soup. These people never would have joined the vanilla versions that have classic roguelike UI's. If there was something like Jiri made they'd hop on the bandwagon immediately.

[vins]

I didn't read anything, but I think it's the good thread to tell my suggestion.
When you attack, you can wrestle by choosing which part will attack which part.
To select a part, you just have to move with the arrows keys/ move the cursor on the part to select it.

I'll make a paint drawing to show you :


EDIT : Image too small...
EDIT 2  : better now.

[juanoleso]

To select a part, you just have to move with the arrows keys/ move the cursor on the part to select it.

Bring VATS to DF.  Thats cool too, I guess... =-)

[vins]

Yeah, something like that.

[BigFatDwarf]

But then, I came in here to really push the subject that I had horrible experiences with pie-menus. Do you know "neverwinter nights"? If so... you know the problem.
As a magician you needed to go through several circles with 9+ items until you got your spell done. Who ever did this without pausing first MUST be a master of hand-eye-coordination so that he took less than my 4 seconds to do so.

Oh, yes, I finished Neverwinter Nights with all expansion packs. It was an example of a bad-designed pie menu.

I was a bit biased in proposing the pie menu because I really like it if properly done ( it should never expand more than a depth level ). I was just curious to see how a pie menu would work into such a interface.

I am for all-text interfaces, by the way ( I'm a console and ascii-lover, nethack style! ), but I liked the design by Jiri Petru and didn't feel like discouraging.

I must say that I didn't have those problems when I was playing NWN. Pie menu can be actually very fast and organised if properly done. Anyway, In NWN you could also used Numpad to navigate thru the menu. Once you use it for a day or two, you kinda get the hang of it and can quickly cast spells or other things. Isn't that hard.

[Lap]

I vote that we also force Toady and Threetoe to attempt to do live action RP shots like URW did for the backgrounds 

[Sowelu]

There's very good reasons to not have any pictures of critters to click on.  One, way more work for modders.  Two, random critters are impossible.

You don't want to raise the bar on what's required to mod the game, and random critters would be impossible entirely...

[Lap]

There's very good reasons to not have any pictures of critters to click on.  One, way more work for modders.  Two, random critters are impossible.

You don't want to raise the bar on what's required to mod the game, and random critters would be impossible entirely...

Agreed completely. Back to the basic interface stuff. Jiri's design could also work well with windows being separate and resizeable like

http://www.zangband.org/common/gfx/screenshots-tk.jpg

I know a couple of the other suggestions used it as part of their design. Shouldn't really change the essense of Jiri's

[vins]

So if I want to wrestle I have to wait 15 sec to select what I want, if I see it the fist time? (even with page down it takes a long time and it's unpratical)

And i made my drawing in 10 minutes....

[zwei]

4.) where is the mini-map?  Well in the future (!!!) we will be able to zoom in and out.  Mouse scroll or ctrl+up/ctrl+down will zoom.  (I guess this one is a suggestion of its own)

I would not do away with minimap, zooming in and out to get overwivew of map is annoying and if minimap allows you to quickly move between points of interest with mouseclick or to scan area with drag.

Besides, DF map minimaps would be quite a eyecandy!

This is for example map rendered with 1 tile = 1 pixel:

[Draco18s]

Just a quick question, how do you remove a "remove ramp" designation?
By your interface using the "Destroy" feature will remove the ramp.