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[nenjin]

What I'm saying is: I think there are clear ways to mitigate the learning curve/accessibility issue before resorting to such drastic measures as what you're describing.

Agreed. Considering how you find DF in the first place, and what it takes just to get into the game you need some information finding skills/inquisitiveness to begin with.

I'd hesitate in saying that they *need* to learn it...snip

Most of the time I'd agree. You shouldn't force learning on people in video games, when learning becomes a task that isn't fun.

DF is an exception to me though, because of how inter-connected Toady strives to make things. Learning the sciencey bits goes hand-in-hand with expanding your gameplay options, and that will become more and more true in every successive version. That's what kept me hooked on DF for literally the first two weeks. Everytime I poked around at something, I found new connections, relationships and ways to manipulate the game. And that's before modifying the RAWs (which we can assume most people won't do until they're very comfortable with the game.)

I too was like "WTF" when it came to the metal economy. I played my first fortress without even building forges. And I did fine (relatively speaking.) All the complicated, detailed bits aren't necessary to getting into game, at all. So why hide them? Because seeing them intimidates new players? You can only go so far to combat people's natural reactions to a deep game before you start dumbing the experience down just to draw more people in. Again I agree with G-Flex. Making a game have "broad appeal" is something marketing execs worry about. Making it "approachable" is something Toady will deal with in time, and probably continue to deal with for the rest of known time. 

There's also a downside to customizing people's learning curves. You start getting people with totally different ideas of what's involved. Like, I didn't know the Economic Stones mod was part of May Day when I started DF. I just assumed that's how it was by default because it seemed sensible. Depending on how people get their version/what settings are set...they may not even know there was actually geography in use, because someone handed them a "Geography for Dummies = 1" version.

[Grendus]

I think the variety of stones is a good thing, makes the game more interesting. It'd be boring to dig through "Dark stone" and "Light stone" looking for "copper ore" and "tin ore" to make "bronze. Much more fun to dig through granite and andesite searching for copper nuggets, cassiterite, and bismuthinite, or to search for precious magnetite veins in multiple layers of limestone.

However, we need better in-game support and help, especially something like a tooltip to explain what each stone does. I would suggest rawing these (it's a single string for each object, shouldn't be hard). For every object in the raws a description could be stored inside of a tag like [DESCRIPTION:Hematite can be turned into iron at a smelter or magma smelter]. When the player loo(k)s at the stone, it would bring up the description in the side bar under where the name is now. The same description would be under the stone in the stones menu.

[G-Flex]

However, we need better in-game support and help, especially something like a tooltip to explain what each stone does. I would suggest rawing these (it's a single string for each object, shouldn't be hard). For every object in the raws a description could be stored inside of a tag like [DESCRIPTION:Hematite can be turned into iron at a smelter or magma smelter]

Honestly, some of this would probably best be generated by the game as-needed. After all, it already does this when listing uses for economic stones. A supplementary description would be nice too, though.

[Gazz]

Honestly, some of this would probably best be generated by the game as-needed. After all, it already does this when listing uses for economic stones. A supplementary description would be nice too, though.

However, we need better in-game support and help, especially something like a tooltip to explain what each stone does. I would suggest rawing these (it's a single string for each object, shouldn't be hard). For every object in the raws a description could be stored inside of a tag like [DESCRIPTION:Hematite can be turned into iron at a smelter or magma smelter]. When the player loo(k)s at the stone, it would bring up the description in the side bar under where the name is now. The same description would be under the stone in the stones menu.

If you have ideas (that have nothing to do with the subject here), why don't you just post them as another thread so they can be found and enhanced upon?



BTW:
A suggestion thread is not a great place to post how much an idea sucks.
Improvements or refinements - now those are productive.
Negativity never helps with milking an idea to the max. All it does is scare others from submitting a possibly great idea when they feel it might not be politically correct and get shot down mercilessly.

In the past I have suggested features and generally... items... for mod projects (or whatever) even though I wouldn't have wanted to use the resulting mod. This would not prevent me from improving an idea to it's full potential.
When discussing a suggested idea it must be completely irrelevant if I personally like it or not.
It's a technical challenge to... improve the mechanism. No more, no less.

[Kilo24]

If you have ideas (that have nothing to do with the subject here), why don't you just post them as another thread so they can be found and enhanced upon?

It's an attempt to solve the problem that the original suggestion is targeted towards, that of presentation of uses of stone.  If another suggestion would solve the problem in a different way, and not be a larger scale than the original suggestion would be, it's worthy of discussing in the same thread.

Several people (myself included) think that providing more information in-game would solve the problem effectively.  If you don't, then please tell us, and tell us what positive aspects your idea has that extra in-game help wouldn't.  We want to know if there is a serious problem that we're not seeing, because it's better for Dwarf Fortress in the long run.

[Gazz]

More information and/or (preferrably) better organised information is good thing.

The difficulty when applying this to DF is that the game is immense. So even if there are tooltips or other means to identify each mineral's possible uses, this only creates more information to digest.

To a complete newbie the difficult bit is certainly not that "stuff" can be mined and then refined into metal or used for whatever. That much is almost self explanatory.
However, when there are 10 different metals, extracted from 30 different minerals, it's hard to keep them all straight while still struggling with the interface and simple things like digging / building rooms.

To a newbie, all these rocks basically look the same. Just a long list of whatchamacallite and dontcarium.
To the experienced player this is not the same list. A few are important, many can safely be ignored or have long been set to auto-dump.
The veteran deals with 2 or 3 "real" options, the newbie with 20, all of which look equally valid.

A game where the "advanced stuff" does not even exist can be played the same way.
You mine, refine, build. It's merely easier to keep on top of things when you don't have so many possibilities which quite frankly, often don't make one bit of difference beyond the colour of the built walls.

A game mode where you have the bare minimum of stone/metal types would help in learning how to play.
And with the system I proposed, the AI would have the same limitations because the high end materials (or creatures) do not exist in the game.
So the player is less likely to be overwhelmed by superior foes with steel battle axes, that he has trouble defeating with his pointy sticks.
Merely hiding the options would not work well.

This would be a very good foundation for a tutorial - not replace one.

It's common practice for basecraft games to slowly give the player more powerful unit types. It's the same principle.
Don't overwhelm the player with too much stuff from the get go. Let him learn how to play and use the interface, then add all the advanced unit types.
It's not my invention. =P

I don't agree that there is a natural progression in game already. In my recent game I had an anvil and started right next to a volcano. Not too hard to get into  metalworking.
Anyway, there is a huge number of inconsequential options at any point in the game. Personally, I totally dig that shit and I spent many hours studying the game before ever installing it. But I also accept that I'm a nerdy engineer and that many see games in a different light. They want to get right into the action, see how this works.

One thing I don't like about the basecraft style of giving me one more unit type per mission: It's often too slow.
I'd like to be able to control what toys I get to play with.
Therefore... complexity levels.
When I'm ready for more stuff, I play with more stuff. My game, my rules.


The funny thing is how this seems to have turned into an argument of complexity settings vs better information.
These are 2 completely separate approaches with the same goal and should be used simultaneously and not in competition to one another.

That's why "better information" should have a dedicated thread to be discussed in detail. It does not belong in here.

[El-Ravager]

I didnt read it all, but a simple sollution here would be to just list the uses of a given stone when you look at it either as natural stone on the map, or mined rock on the ground. So looking at alunite it would say 'rock', microcline would say 'most awesome of rocks' and hematite would say 'smelt into iron bars' and so on.

[Starver]

The only stumbling blocks I've found with regards to geology aren't directly related to it. Things like, Bauxite not being clearly labeled as really, really important. The same with flux stones.

An idea (which I don't think I saw exactly like this in later replies, though there were similar ideas) would be to change the "You have struck microcline!" message to something like "You have struck <stone_name>, you can now do <whatever>!".

Thus "You have struck Haematite, your foundaries can now produce iron!" or "You have struck Tetrahydrite, an valuable ore of Copper and Silver" or plain "You have struck Microcline!", or words to that effect.  Perhaps with "struck <rocktype> again" and "produce more <product>" for subsequent hits.

And maybe allow us to quietly drop the messages, in a selectively configurable way: e.g. "Message Pause On Digging Into" option settable for each of ores, economic rocks, gems and "all rocks" (the latter as a default/override, or by different wording covering all 'mundane' rock without purpose), each with alternatives of "No", "On first encounter" and "On each new vein or deposit".  And tagged onto that you could be an additional verbosity/helpfulness level (perhaps per sub-type, but as it's normally just ores that would need such precise details and economic rocks are pretty interchangable once you know that they are economic, it could easily be a single global on the same menu item, or directly derive from the oft-mentioned "playing difficulty").

If implemented at config-file level, rather than via menus, you might be able to specify actual favourite/least-favourite Raw-Types to include/exclude from the messaging process, to fine tune the classifications and cater for "Olivine Towers" megaprojecting.  But, either way, Genuine Clownite might be considered an exception which has an unblockable message.

[sproingie]

I suspect a simple "help" option for every selectable object, including stone, would go a long way.  Or more like a "Dwarfopaedia".

Anyway, stone layers are one of the things you have the power to do something about.  If you don't like the names of stone, you actually can change it.  I like occasionally pulling up Wikipedia entries to see what various stones look like.  I had no idea that was an elite nerd power.

[Grendus]

The problem with new players learning the game is the overwhelming amount of things they're given. Reducing the types of stone won't solve this if they can't figure out how to mine. We need walkthroughs, not complexity settings. Walkthroughs which are provided by the community on the Gameplay Questions forum and which Toady has promised before the 1.0 release (because there's no point in spending his time writing a new walkthrough every version).

What's more, this can be done via modding. Players writing tutorials could, if they so desired, mod the game so that there's just generic sand, volcanic stone, sedimentary stone, iron ore, etc. No need to reinvent the wheel, a better solution would be better internal mod support (selecting mod files from the main screen instead of mucking around in the DF files) and better walkthrough, wiki, and gameplay help support. This would require heavy coding on Toady's part to support this option on multiple mods, or else he would have to hard code it which he doesn't want to do. In short, it's a good idea, but other solutions would solve the problem better.

[G-Flex]

Honestly, one thing I can say is that I don't think DF would have come off as being nearly as interesting to me if, when first loading it up, all the stone and metal types were completely generic. I think it would have been a pretty big misrepresentation of what the game has to offer.

If you have ideas (that have nothing to do with the subject here), why don't you just post them as another thread so they can be found and enhanced upon?

Of course they have to do with the subject. The suggestion here is about smoothing out the learning curve for new players, especially as it concerns the vast number of material types in the game. Trying to think of alternate solutions to a problem is not "unrelated"; it's a good thing when trying to solve most problems.

A suggestion thread is not a great place to post how much an idea sucks.
Improvements or refinements - now those are productive.
Negativity never helps with milking an idea to the max. All it does is scare others from submitting a possibly great idea when they feel it might not be politically correct and get shot down mercilessly.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't agree with you less here. Constructive feedback for a suggestion, discussing whether or not it's a good idea, and discussing whether or not there are also other things to be done to solve the same problem are all constructive things, and I don't see why you'd think otherwise.

Not everyone feels that every idea should be "milked to the max", because not everyone is going to like every idea.

[Footkerchief]

A suggestion thread is not a great place to post how much an idea sucks.
Improvements or refinements - now those are productive.
Negativity never helps with milking an idea to the max. All it does is scare others from submitting a possibly great idea when they feel it might not be politically correct and get shot down mercilessly.

The rules at the top of Suggestions touch on this explicitly: "If you don't like a suggestion, say why and be civil about it."  Everyone in this thread has followed that rule, and yes, sometimes constructive criticism means explaining why something sucks.

[nenjin]

I would find this very useful:

If economic stones usable in construction had a tiny hammer icon next to the name.
If fire-safe stones had a little flame next to the name.
If item-specific stones had a little hand icon next to them.
If smeltable stones/ores had a little metal bar next to them.

Eventually, we'd probably see symbols like the Radioactivity symbol for radioactive stones, skull and crossbones for poisonous rocks, ect...

Coupled with an option to disable/enable these symbols (under the Stocks menu or .ini) would allow new players to know what stones are good for....or let veteran players/hardcore discovers to learn for themselves.

I don't know how feasible it is to do symbols like that in ASCII...but it probably wouldn't be that hard.

[Atanamis]

You can put me firmly on the side of "better documentation will solve the problem". I like nenjin's suggestion of a visible indicator on the stone name, with G-Flexes idea of a single button push access to detailed information about the stone. People who are going to like DF are going to be ok with complexity, what is currently annoying is that you can't find the information quickly and in game. What is really the difference between having "Iron Ore" or "Hematite (an iron ore)"? Both make it easy for a new user to quickly know what the stone they are looking at does, and the latter allows them to become familiar with the name. It would actually make the game HARDER to learn if the names of ores changed between "beginner" and "advanced" levels! So, I agree that showing a "simplified technical view" is desirable, but it should be in addition to the real name rather than instead of the real name.

[Dabi]

I find it fun to find new things that I hadn't seen before and expand my knowledge of the universe for my ultimate goal of ruling the world?

I mean not everyone loves to read up about things everytime they see a new "thing". I find it interesting and I learn new things then I may go to a actual wikipedia. Dig down more and learn more and more like history etc.

Say i...found magnetite then went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetite just to learn more about the actual stuff and then come out knowing more which is not a bad thing ever(unless your in certain circumstances which I won't bother bringing up).

But a simple option wouldn't be bad...but i guess it's kind of like the graphics at first it's overwhelming then it becomes second nature and you walk out with more knowledge in this case.