Eh. More like, only players who can cope with the keyboard-only interface currently get hooked on the game in the first place. This is the same kind of false logic used by fans of the ASCII graphics - for every gamer attracted to the old-school idiosyncrasies of DF, a dozen is turned off by the gigantic learning curve the interface imposes on people.
I'll readily admit that I'm a keyboard person. Alt-Tab, Ctrl-X, tabbing around forms (when not set up with a rediculuous tab order!), all so much easier to combine with typing (two-handed not-quite-touch-typing) rather than moving one hand off the keyboard area and wiggling the mouse around.
As such, I know I'm biased.
And it's *so* not always faster to use the keyboard! Off the top of my head:
1) I switch to the mouse a lot when I'm designating complicated mining orders. It's already more convenient.
Tap tap tap the numpad, double-tap enter to assign single tiles, shift and cursors to move 10 blocks, shift-cursor and three back cursors to move seven at a time. Easier to do than to explain, and much better accuracy than attempting to 'paint' with the mouse. For me.
2) If you could scroll the map around by moving the mouse cursor up to the edge of the screen, like in most classic RTS games, it would be a lot easier to get an overview of the play field.
Shift-cursor in non-designation mode takes you around in larger jumps, and I find my bidirectional hand-finger coordination works well. I really don't like mouse-at-edge-of-screen movement, because you have difficulties when trying to select something at the edge and the system decides to scroll you. Or you have a CPU-lag of some kind and it doesn't move immediately, but then moves too far. When it comes to mousing-controlled scrolling around a screen, I pref the "hold button and pull around" method, but even that has some issues.
3) You can't seriously claim that the current keyboard-interface is particularly practical for all the lists you need to scroll through in the game - stones, furniture, trade goods, dwarves, labor settings, animals, etc. Imagine if you could use the mouse wheel to scroll through pages, and just click on whatever you wanted.
Apart from the fact that you get used to the key combinations needed for most things (bCw for walls, etc, similar for setting up mass-dumpings, etc, the unlettered crafts-menu items like bone bolts needing some cursoring, admitedly, but at least beind the default item when immediately adding the next task), the only problem I really have scrolling is working out (occasionally) whether it's the cursor/page-up-and-down method for a list or the /*-+ one. But once you know what it is... Sorry, once
I know which it is, my muscle memory does all the hard work. And unlike mice wheels, I can control it precisely. I have a wheel-mouse on this computer. I just tried it to scroll up and down, and it feels 'ragged'.
IMO a perfect interface would be possible to navigate using only the keyboard, and using only the mouse. And the optimal way to play would be to switch back and forth, depending on what input mechanism is most convenient for a given task.
Indeed, for the policy of There Is More Than One Way To Do It is good, and gives the individual choice. Personally I doubt I'd use the mouse at all and would probably stick with keys alone. I've seen the discussion of the wheelmouse useage in the win-versions, and seen the settings in the init that suggest I can use the mouse, but I've never been bothered enough to find out why the Cursor graphic that is defined within the program directories isn't used when I shift the mouse over the window, like I reckon it should.
There's a reason mouse+keyboard interfaces has been standard for a couple of decades. ¬_¬
I've got nothing against mouse+keyboard. Doom-style playing (keyboard mainly for fore/back and strafing movement, with jump/run/keys/weapon-change keys in close proximity for holding or tapping as required, leaving mouse-aiming to the other hand and sometimes using the buttons for firing rather than tasking to the left hand). And obviously I wouldn't try to paint a picture with cursor keys (though sometimes I think it would come out better), but for navigating spreadsheets I'll hardly ever use a mouse (maybe when I want to put the cell-contents cursor in the middle of the complex formula indicated), and when I do use it it wrenches a hand away from the keyboard where I feel more comfortable with the two of them. Sorting folder contents by size in Windows (or changing the display type to Details, List or Icon) is a few quick taps of the appropriate keys, rather than sweeping the mouse across vast swathes of screen-landscape to accomplish the same task, and risking hitting a few pixels off in my rush...
Horses. Courses. Of course.
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Topic: mouse-oriented control scheme (Read 1080 times)